Empowering Service Excellence

Professor Conrad Lashley
Nottingham Trent University, UK
23-26 September 2008

"Professor Lashley displayed a vast amount of knowledge on this topic - and others! I really appreciated the opportunity to discuss concepts and practices with him throughout the course - very inspiring!"
- Cara George, Training Development Manager, Toga Hospitality, Australia

"Excellent facilities, excellent course material, excellent facilitator! The QRC Executive Education Series provide a wonderful learning opportunity."
- Ken Patterson, Conference Manager, Copthorne Commodore

Course Description

In today's highly competitive marketplace, employee empowerment offers hotel, restaurant and other service organisations a chance to build genuine competitive advantage through service excellence. Empowering employees makes sense in commercial terms. Improvements in service quality, customer care, repeat business and customer retention, lower staff turnover and increased profits are at the heart of interest in empowerment. This course will explore employee empowerment and show how management practice can be adapted to access the considerable benefits of empowering employees in hospitality operations. 

Who is the course designed for?

This course is designed for senior executives in hotel, restaurant, resort, tourism and travel organisations. Building competitive advantage through service quality experience and the management of host and guest relations can be undertaken by managers from single business units or in multi-unit chains. It is designed for both corporate executives, unit managers, and individual entrepreneurs.

Benefits

The programme shows how to build a genuine empowered culture in which all are committed to delighting customers. This in turn results in improved customer retention and increased customer loyalty, based upon improved employee performance and reduced employee turnover. When properly managed this brings tangible business benefits to both commercial and public sector organisations. Individually, participants benefit from opportunities to reflect on current practices and future directions and are enthused to attempt cultural shifts in their organisation 

Objectives

On completion of this course successful participants will be able to:

  • Consider how traditional hospitality values in guest and host transaction can build customer loyalty.
  • Discuss the role emotional dimensions play in hospitality service quality provision
  • Recognise the crucial importance of human resources in creating competitive advantage through hospitable behaviour and hospitality service excellence
  • Critically evaluate the forms of empowerment through which to manage the service offering to customers
  • Analyse the barriers to employee empowerment and create an implementation strategy for introducing empowerment into your organisation
  • Evaluate the means by which your organisation captures business performance using stakeholder perspectives

Course Content

  • Understanding hospitality as a social phenomenon
  • Emotional dimensions of hospitality service interactions
  • Service quality management for competitive advantage
  • Empowering business performance
  • Employment strategy and the service organisation
  • The relational dimension of empowerment
  • Forms of empowerment
  • The psychology of empowerment
  • Barriers to implementation
  • High quality employment practice

The final stage of the programme involves detailed planning of proposals designed to be implemented by participants when they return to their work organisation. This planning process involves detailed consideration of operational context, the potential barriers to success and tactics needed to overcome them.

Guest Presenter

Professor Conrad Lashley is Head of the Centre for Leisure Retailing at Nottingham Trent University in the United Kingdom. He is recognised as one of the world's leading experts in employee empowerment and his book, ‘Empowerment: HR strategies for service excellence' has been hailed as the best book to be published on the topic. Conrad has published 20 books and official reports, as well as over 100 conference papers and research journal articles.

Conrad has worked in large corporations and in small firms, including a small hotel and country inn. His career commenced with the large catering conglomerate - J. Lyons & Co Ltd., and finished as Product Group Manager for Catering Products with Findus Ltd. Subsequently he has had over 30 years experience of management education in further and higher education in the UK and internationally. He is currently a member of the panel of experts for Tourism and Hospitality Education - International Centre of Excellence funded by the Australian government.

Conrad works closely with many major UK companies, providing management development, research and consultancy services supporting hospitality, leisure and tourism organisations.

Fee

The fee is NZ$ 3,350 plus GST. This includes course materials, refreshments, lunches, a class dinner and a cocktail welcome the night before the course commences.

To REGISTER

Download, complete and return the registration form [PDF DOWNLOAD 614KB], or contact us for further information.