Shangri-La employs Kaizen plan

CEBU, Philippines – While most companies resort to retrenchment programs to cope with the tough times, Shangri-La’s Mactan Resort and Spa instead boosts workforce benefits to make its people more productive.

Shangri-La’s Mactan, one of Cebu’s largest employers in the tourism industry, maintains a total of 760 regular employees and over 200 contractual workers. The resort follows the Kaizen approach putting forward the best interest of its employees instead of cutting them off from the workforce.

Kaizen refers to a Japanese philosophy that focuses on continuous improvement throughout all aspects of life and Kaizen activities in the workplace means to continually improve all functions of a business.

The five-star resort recently conducted a special economic briefing with its top management to help the employees get a full understanding of the current global economic status.

Shangri-La’s Mactan general manager Raymond Bragg said that in times of crisis, employees should be taken cared of and must be well informed of the state of the economy to help broaden their knowledge and make them appreciate the job that they have.

The economic briefing conducted by Cebuano economist Perry Fajardo provided the employees a clearer picture of the current economic situation of both global and local markets.

Fajardo, specifically highlighted the importance for companies to adopt the Kaizen Approach, which is to take care of manpower during crisis, in order to improve productivity, as a way of cutting cost.

“Increase incentives and benefits to encourage productivity-- instead of firing workers,” Fajardo stressed. Retrenching workers will espouse fears among those who are left.

Personnel who are working in an environment of uncertainty and fear do not produce a good product or service, “they will be unhappy.”

This time competitive environment in tourism, coupled with the declining volume of arrivals, hospitality companies should improve and strengthen their customer service niche, and the key to a happy personnel is to provide them with secured employment, good pay, and benefit packages.

Cutting cost does not necessarily mean terminating a service of an employee. Fajardo believes that there are a lot of ways a company can cut operational expenses, rather than throwing a person into a jobless environment.

Bragg said although Shangri-La is still performing quite well, despite the world’s economic crunch, improving the customer service and making its people happy is one of the important shields that will make Shangri-La a competitive player in tourism industry.

According to Bragg, tourism entities in Cebu are not only threatened by the attractive destinations abroad like Bali, Phuket, Kota Kinabalu, Penang, among others, it is also competing with its own neighboring destination like Palawan and Boracay.

“There are so many other resort destinations in Asia,” Bragg said adding that Cebu is also closely competing with other resort destinations in Philippines.

Recently, Bragg announced that the chain put its confidence in the tourism industry in Cebuby building the multi-million peso boutique hotel that is designed to accommodate the affluent travelers from all over the world.

The accommodation level of the boutique resort can be comparable to the famous Amanpulo exclusive Resort in Palawan, although its accommodation cost may be a bit lesser than that of Amanpulo.

He said Shangri-La will be hiring over a hundred additional resort staff to man this new creation that is expected to change the tourism landscape in Cebu and ultimately lure the most discriminating travel market in the world.