Roaring Dragon Hotel

Introduction: The Roaring Dragon Hotel is a three-star hotel that is located in the southwest part of China. Since the 1980s the state-owned-enterprise has enjoyed a long colorful history and reputation as on of the regions premium hotels. The at the office which is in another city. On average Mr. Wen shows up at the hotel once a month. In 2002 he decided that it was time to expand their hotel and make the jump to a five star hotel. Wen hired a consulting company to conduct an evaluation of his hotel from top to bottom. Everything from the service to the procedures was included in the evaluation. He also wanted to make sure that his employees would be able to make the jump to a premium hotel. The results of the evaluation were shocking to Mr. Wen. The results showed that his staff was lazy and incompetent. There was no way that he would be able to make the transition to a five star hotel without firing most of the six-hundred employees or spending a large amount on re-training the existing ones. It was found that employees were reading newspapers, drinking tea, conducting personal business and even leaving the premises while on the clock.

Background: Roaring Dragon Hotel with long colorful history needed change since the market economy was slowly developing in the region and so they need competitiveness to compete with other local hotels and also with international hotels. They need new paradigm and new practices and mind set. It is the big change from planned economy era to market economy era. By these needs, the provincial government identified Hotel International as an organization to take over management of the RDH and help realize the hotels potential. In 1999, Mr. Paul Fortune, from Austria, had taken over as the manager of the hotel. He brought in significant changes to the hotel. But unfortunately, the changes he brought in turned out to be against the success of hotel.

Problem: Guanxi was practiced in RDH for several of years. The employees that had good hotel. The management of HI decided to finish the concept of guanxi, and hired new employees on the basis of education. Many of the old employees were not happy with this decision, and they decided to quit RDH. The turnover rate was increasing and the hotel was losing its business because of this. Wen, formerly enjoyed the privileges of being the GM. But after the appointment of Fortune as the new GM, he was not able to invite guests to RDH and give free complimentary accommodation. He started to have conflicts with the HI management and the workers also did not like the HI style of management. The employees did not work with interest. In the working hours, they used to play cards and read news paper. Many of the Chinese managers were working on their side business and used to go their whenever got time. This non-professional attitude of the employees was affecting the performance of RDH. HI took a notice of the situation, tried to bring discipline in the workplace but was eventually did not succeed. I think this happened because of several reasons. Firstly, I believe that their culture over there has a lot to do with it. While I dont agree with the employees behavior, I realize that their culture has a lot more relaxed approach. I assume that this had a snowball effect towards the employees work ethic and habits. Secondly, I believe that there was not enough direct supervision for the employees. It said in the article that there were approximately two supervisors for ever one-hundred employees. It also said that employees could go days and even weeks without seeing their supervisor. With that much unsupervised time the temptation is too great to slack off and not accomplish the task at hand. Lastly, I believe that there was no motivation for the employees. Because the hotel was government funded there was no motivation for the employees to perform in order for the company to succeed. No matter how the hotel did the government would keep throwing money at them.