“If you take care of your people, your
people will take care of your customers, and your business will take care of
itself.”
JW Marriott
John Willard Marriott was an American
entrepreneur who founded the Marriott Corporation, one of the world's largest
hotel chains and food services companys. The Company rose from a small root
beer stand in Washington D.C. in 1927, to a chain of family restaurants by 1932,
to his first motel in 1957. By the time of his death the Marriott company
operated 1,400 restaurants and 143 hotels and resorts worldwide, employing
154,600 people, with an annual turnover of 4.5 billion dollars.
Marriott believed the key to success
in business was building a strong team of employees around him. “Employee
loyalty is of great importance,” he once said. “That comes by treating
employees the way management would like to be treated.”
Marriott was always keen to make sure
that his employees’ needs were met. He understood that ‘big picture’ things
like building employee loyalty and corporate pride were the direct result of
smaller things like providing clean professional looking uniforms and suitable
equipment. He made the effort to constantly communicate with his employees, to
show them he was sincerely interested in them and in improving their work
environment.
Marriott once explained that: “It’s
important to listen to employees, ask questions of them, ask about their
families, and get to know a little bit about their aspirations, ambitions, home
life and work motivations. We have great morale in our restaurants, hotels, and
other operations because our employees know we are interested in them and do
all we can for them.”
Marriott also understood that workers
appreciated incentives, and the opportunity to move forward: “In our business
an hourly employee can become a department manager and general manager in only
a short time.”
Everything that Marriott did was based
on the principles of hard work and finding ways to encourage his employees to
do the same, which he quickly discovered meant treating them as you would want
to be treated yourself.
“You can't have a service business
with a lot of employees, without having people who know how to manage,” he once
said. “So we have been teaching our managers how to manage, as well as our
employees how to take care of their jobs. Good management and trained personnel
are the most important factors in business.”
REFERENCE
Marriott, J.W., and Brown, K.A., 1997,
The Spirit to Serve, Snowball Publishing.