Mr. Walter

Spas, Health & Fitness

Finding the Right People: Identifying Competencies and Hiring for Attitude

By Todd Walter, Chief Executive Officer, Red Door Spa Holdings

Hotels and spas share many attributes, perhaps none more salient than that both are in the service industry. Whether we’re selling rooms for the night or massages for the hour, what differentiates one service provider from the next is the overall guest experience. Frontline employees shape guests’ perceptions and make the difference between a “Wow!” experience and just an average one. At Red Door Spa Holdings, we have come to realize that our associates don’t just represent our brand, they are the brand.

About three years ago, we conducted a competitive analysis of the North American spa industry. The overall rate of growth for spa services, which had seen strong double-digit increases for well over a decade, was beginning to slow, yet the number of new spas opening continued to accelerate. We asked ourselves how we would continue to succeed in this ever-increasingly competitive landscape. Our conclusion: we would focus on the guest experience. Providing a quality technical service (whether it be a massage, facial, pedicure, or hair cut) was simply the price of admission…if we were going to succeed in the long run, then we needed to provide the best overall guest experience in the day spa industry, period. Our senior management team came together and documented our core values and beliefs. From that exercise came our mission statement to our guests – “to exceed your expectations by providing you with impeccable customer service, expertise, and the finest quality products.” Our philosophy is a simple one: ensure that we have the right people doing the right things in the right way. If we do, then our guests will be happy, they will come back frequently, and they will tell their friends about us. With the “what” identified, we then needed to ensure we had the “who” to make it happen.

At Red Door, we are fortunate to have John Young, former EVP of Human Resources for Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, on our Board of Directors. Following a board meeting, I asked John how he had helped to develop the customer service culture at Four Seasons. John replied, “You don’t develop a culture. You have to begin at the beginning by hiring people who genuinely want to serve others. When you find those people, you can then train them to meet the business needs. In short, when you hire for attitude and shared beliefs, the culture will take care of itself.” With John’s help, we instituted a program at Red Door to define competencies for various frontline positions, to find people who exhibit those competencies (i.e., who have the right attitude), to hire those people, to train them to meet our business needs, to develop programs to retain them, and to identify and cull those people already in the company who didn’t share our passion, our values, and our beliefs.

Defining Competencies

The first step in our process was to define the specific competencies each frontline position requires for the individual in the position to be successful (e.g., compassion, conflict management, approachability, etc.). To help us frame the definitions, we used For Your Improvement: A Guide For Development and Coaching, by Michael Lombardo and Robert Eichinger. In this resource tool, the authors define 67 competencies and provide examples of differing skill levels (i.e., unskilled, skilled, overused skill). We narrowed our definitions to the 15 most important competencies for our spa General Managers and Guest Service Representatives. We then evaluated existing staff and rated them on their proficiency against these competencies. This process allowed us to assess our associates against a benchmark for their respective positions, so that we could identify those likely to be highly successful in their current roles, those needing further development, and those who were unlikely ever to be successful in their position given the required job attributes. We established career development plans for those exhibiting the right stuff, and we reassigned the others, or moved them out of the organization altogether.

Finding and Hiring

Once we identified what we were looking for, we developed specific interviewing tools designed to elicit and test for the required competencies. Interviewing guides were developed, providing sample questions to help the interviewer, with a particular emphasis on customer service, attitude, and teamwork. Those individuals responsible for hiring were then trained on specific interviewing techniques, and we began the process of moving from simply filling a position to finding the right fit. At all times, we stressed the notion of “when in doubt, don’t hire.”

With the tools in place, we needed a pipeline of potential candidates to meet our ongoing needs. As we evaluated the various sources for potential new associates, a recurring pattern emerged…our best source for new associates was our existing employee population. Associates who had been referred by other associates tended to be more qualified and better suited to our culture. To encourage this flow, we instituted a formal Associate Referral Program that economically rewards associates for referring candidates who are ultimately hired by and stay with our company. While we continue to use other traditional sources for finding job applicants (e.g., the internet, job fairs, etc.), our Associate Referral Program provides us with the most consistent flow of quality candidates.

Training and Retaining

Ensuring we have the “right” people is not limited to our hiring process. Every new associate is required to go through orientation training before ever coming into contact with a guest. In the new-hire training, in addition to sharing our 100-year heritage with new associates, we stress our vision and mission statements, and we stress our core values of relationships (both internal and external), commitment, and passion. We then reinforce these values on a continual basis through on-going training and through systems designed to hold us accountable to ourselves and to our guests. As an example, we solicit feedback directly from our guests by asking them to take a short survey following each visit. The survey, based largely on Fred Reichheld’s book, The Ultimate Question, asks our guests just two simple questions: 1) How would you rate your overall experience at our spa, and 2) How likely are you to refer us to a friend? We track the survey results weekly by location, we use the detailed guest comments to reinforce excellent guest service by sharing positive feedback with all associates, and we use constructive guest feedback to address root-cause issues and to identify training opportunities. We then follow through on our brand promise by proactively reaching out to every guest who we have failed to exceed his or her expectations. This program constantly reinforces our brand promise and provides us with detailed feedback on where specifically we can improve.

Three years ago, we assessed the competitive landscape for our industry and realized that we needed to focus on elevating the guest experience if we were going to continue to be successful. Being in a service industry, our people personify our brand promise. As such, it is imperative that we have only those individuals who share our core values and beliefs in our organization and who take care of our guests. We embarked on a process and developed tools to identify the “right” people for us, to weed out those better suited elsewhere, and to provide training and systems that hold us accountable to ourselves and to our guests on a consistent and constant basis. In three years, I believe we have made significant progress, but we know that we can always improve. We strive to constantly raise the bar, and it is our people, the “right” people, who make it happen.

Mr. Todd Walter is COO of Red Door Spa Holdings. He has experience in financial restructuring and turnaround management. Mr. Walter has provided financial and senior operating leadership to struggling companies in varied positions including: CFO and acting COO of Naked Juice, CFO of Cluett American Corp., acting Vice President of Operations for MobileMedia Corporation, and Treasurer of a private, post-secondary education company. Mr. Walter has a BA from Middlebury College and an MBA from the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia. Mr. Walter can be contacted at 203-905-1779 or twalter@rdspas.com Extended Bio...

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