How can you use data to drive culture change in hospitality?

I had a refreshing experience at a Shell shop. When I entered, the shop attendant met me with a beautiful smile and a basket. Her demeanor was genuine, her smile was warm. More importantly, she exhibited product knowledge, and her recommendations were spot on. In my mind, I thought it was a onetime thing, but my subsequent visits proved otherwise. I have encountered all 3 attendants at different times, the service has always been the same. That is an excellent service culture! The team have been intentionally trained to act in a certain way with customers. Before actions can be called culture, there must be repetition, which will lead to a pattern of lifestyle. For businesses, culture must be intentionally designed and not left to chance!

Data, both qualitative and quantitative, serves as a way to benchmark where we're starting with culture change. It serves as a guide for setting goals, choosing priorities, and building on strengths. Additionally, collecting data throughout a culture change initiative serves as a compass to let people know if changes being made are on track/off track and if things are headed in the desired direction.

Data can help and assist in understanding certain aspects and attributes, however actual intervention will remain at human element. Managers need to derive and create the culture that the organisation wishes to embrace, it has to get linked to the core values of the organisation.

One of the biggest barriers to change, is people not understanding why change is needed. People often wonder "what's wrong with the way things are." Additionally, culture change done well is based on the people's vision because they were part of creating it. Culture change, like any other change initiative, is most effective using a high involvement strategy. Synthesize people's stories, experiences, and the data into a vision and then link and label. In our data collection, we learned XYZ which is where our vision of ABC is from.

The whole point of culture change is to come into alignment, or because a new values, principles and standards are needed. The data is what informs a gap between what's stated and what's happening, or what's creating the current climate within an organization that may need a refresh. In hospitality specifically, I've seen organizations who say they value customer service, but treat employees terribly. It's unreasonable to expect an employee who's treated terribly to turn around and provide excellent customer service. It's important to look at internal behaviors that support or detract from successful execution of values.

Employee feedback is part of the data set that needs to inform culture change. Additionally, involving employees in decision-making on what matters most helps to create buy-in and a sense of ownership in the process. On average culture change takes 3-7 years and the failure rate is quite high. So it's wise to slow down and focus on a high involvement approach to increase the success rate. Faster is not better.

Employees are always motivated. Motivation is simply energy to act. There's either high quality motivation or low quality motivation. The question ought to be, how do use data to create high quality motivation instead of low quality motivation. High quality motivation comes from meeting the psychological needs of people - autonomy, relatedness and competence. You can use data to give employees choice (i.e., autonomy) over aspects of the change, you can also use data to create connection and a sense of belonging, and if employees are equipped with skills, tools, and resources to be successful in the change - they will build competence along the way.

Data is good. Data that is used to enables a narrative that defines a sense of identity meaning and motivation is better. Data is meaningless without context. Context is always perceived via a sense of Identity. So always try to use data to explain or understand a context and use that context to reveal the identity that perceives the context.

One thing I have always found useful is human element in any issue, or change in policy or practice, data, analysis/analytics help in getting insights and guiding towards taking a conscious decision in closing the matter.

Quite honestly, the first thing to consider is what culture change means for your business, and if you’re using that term when you should be using something else. Culture is quite difficult to measure and is always changing, so data will only go so far if you don’t have clear metrics and a clear arrival point. Focus less on change and more on improvements. Take the word “culture” out of the equation and focus on the aspects you’d like to improve: 1. Communication 2. Trust 4. Alignment Etc. Then determine, leveraging the data you have already, where you sit on the key themes you feel are at the core of your business problem. From there you can collect and analyze new data to determine what needs solving and in what order.