Insight #28 - Hire With Care; Assess For Care; Embed Care
Care as a term or measure of service is most commonly used in healthcare or medicine. I believe it can be a pivotal service differentiator.
Here are 3 Actionable Insights for the service leader that cares:
1. Hire With Care
If you only want to implement one thing from this insight start with this. Hire with care includes making hiring decisions with a lot of care, and adding a ton of care to your entire candidate experience. From your careers website to the communication, to the real world interview, everything should exude care for the candidate.
2. Assess For Care
Does your selection process check for a care parameter? A good selection process checks for KSA - Knowledge, Skills & Attitude. Now some might point to that and say doesn't attitude assessment include care? If it does for your organisation, kudos, but what I generally see is 'pleasant personality' checks. While a smiling, warm persona is a very good thing to have, it does not mean the person is high on care score.
Care checks could include, checking for listening skills, the ability to make someone feel welcome, being interested in the other person's story, being positive, showing concern, creating solutions, explaining things clearly.
3. Embed Care
This is super powerful. Embed every process with care. Ensure that there is a core CARE element for both your team and your guests.
Real-World Examples
For Hire With Care
Here is a hack that can make you a super boss:
take everything good that you do for your guests/customers and do it for your team.
Reservation confirmation is (usually) an email that is sent to the customer once the booking is confirmed. This has the guest details, dates, type of room, payment, any other services etc. Some hotels have improved this to include information about the country, city, airport, directions and even things to see & do. Imagine if you sent a similar confirmation for interviews.
The candidate gets the following in an email:
Date, time, venue of the interview
About the company, unit, city
An introduction to the interview panel. A little write up whom they will meet with or maybe LinkedIn URLs. You can also use this to see how much research the candidate does. Do they care enough to read about the people they will meet with?
Any other information that is important - dress code, parking rules, use of changing rooms etc.
How much time the entire process might take. If there are steps (like written tests, online tests etc) these could be mentioned too.
On the day of the interview, imagine the security guard at the staff entrance actually welcoming them and wishing them all the best! Letting them know where they can get ready/changed for the interview.
For Assess For Care
While most interviews check for knowledge and skills (thing tests, food trials, make-a-room or set-a-table challenges), add a formal process to assess for care.
How? Simulations. Give the candidate an elaborate scenario or situation. This could be a fictional case or even better is to take something from your 'incident logs'. Sometimes the responses, ideas, from candidates will surprise you and make you rethink your team's response.
In these responses, look for care. If that quality comes through, you can always train them on hard skills.
For Embed Care
An example of Care For Restaurant Service Staff.
Health experts commonly recommend drinking about 2 litres of water a day. Do you make this happen for your team? Have you created a process to measure this? Help them with it, or even ensure they do?
What if you used a little whiteboard in the back area, with everyone's name and 8 glass icons that they keep filling in. What if you as a leader kept checking it and once in a while stopped someone and made sure they had a sip? What if we cared that much?
The good thing about caring is that you can keep doing more of it. For example, once you achieve the above for your team, you can do the following: for climes that are cold, you can keep warm water for your team in the service area.
Hey! Thank you for reading till the end. Do get in touch - p.bedi@eclathospitality.com - if you would like to:
receive a sample of a CARE interview email confirmation,
add 'assess for care' to your interviews
set up amazing 'incident logs'
create more CARE for your teams
p.s. If you think this insight could be useful to someone, do care to share.
This is Insight #28. For all insights published so far, do visit www.eclathospitality.com/insights