Beyond Oral History - The Club Operations Plan

The term “oral history” is used to describe the practices of early societies to pass on historical and cultural information to succeeding generations thereby preserving the knowledge and traditions of the group.? More recently it has come to describe the recording of personal impressions from witnesses of historic events.? But as valuable as these methods were to ancient cultures, as well as to modern day historians, they should never, by default, be the basis for preserving and disseminating the organizational values and operational methods of a business enterprise.

The danger of doing so has long been revealed by a demonstration of the unreliability of verbal communication.? In this exercise a simple written message is given to the first person in a group and then whispered sequentially through multiple individuals to the final recipient.? The transmitted message is then read to the group and compared to the original note.? The result is a surprising and often incomprehensible jumble of words in no way resembling the original message.? If this isn’t proof positive of the unsuitability of oral transmission of important information, I don’t know what is!

Yet this is what many private clubs do when they fail to create written expectations for the performance and behavior of their employees or provide thorough and consistent training based on those expectations.? This is even more egregious when one recognizes the complexity and nuance involved in quality and service – a far cry from the simplicity of the mangled message from the previous paragraph.?

Often it seems that when a club hires someone who has prior experience in service roles, this is sufficient evidence that they know what to do in all important and expected service situations.? Such an assumption is na?ve in the extreme.? The fallacy of such thinking is exposed in a few ways:

• Service employees come from a variety of backgrounds, cultures, learning environments, and experiences.? What constitutes manners, norms of behavior, and the expectations inherent in quality and service are by no means commonly understood.?
• Even an applicant with a strong service resume at another club does not in any way ensure he or she will meet the standards of your operation.
• Many clubs have significant turnover, meaning that successive generations of employees can move through the doors with mind-numbing speed.? Without well-defined (read “written”) training materials, your expectations and standards will be just as fragile and fleeting as the whispered message mentioned above.
• Since hiring for the service ranks is rarely done in bulk, but rather piecemeal as employees come and go, there is seldom the opportunity for consistency of group training.? The danger here is that any new hire(s) may not get the same orientation and training as previous hires due to the busy-ness of the season and the other priorities of distracted managers.
• All the same dangers inherent in the faulty assumptions concerning line employees are just as real, only with far greater consequences, in the hiring of new managers and supervisors.? Don’t for a moment expect that they possess from prior experience the unique values, leadership methods, expectations, or standards of quality and service of your club.
• Lastly, how can the chief operating officer or general manager who is ultimately responsible for the club’s performance be sure that the various departments have established the expected standards of quality and service without the ability to review these and modify them as necessary.? While personal observation is helpful, it does nothing to ensure consistency of message and practice.? The only sure way is to have all the essential details of your operation in writing and available for review while also forming the basis for consistent training and transmission of important information throughout the organization.

The only way to ensure the club is not operating from oral history is to create a Club Operations Plan.? This plan is the fully integrated and detailed description of the organizational structure, systems, and processes that enable the multiple operating departments of the club to deliver a seamless, consistent, and high-quality private club experience to its members.?

But an operations plan is no easy thing to create as you can see from the complexity and detail of the included materials in the diagram at the top of this blog.? Yet this diagram can also serve as the roadmap to help you design your plan, particularly when you realize that you don’t have to develop everything at once and the basic building blocks of an operations plan are the individual standards, policies, and procedures (SPPs) describing how the club conducts its business.

Should you decide to undertake the task of preparing a Club Operations Plan, you need not start from scratch.? Private Club Performance Management has developed and offers a wide variety of highly integrated resources to assist in improving the current operating paradigm of club operations.? Certainly, there is a cost and effort involved, but the reasonable investment in ready resources to move beyond the oral history foundation of so many operations is a small price to pay to the immense benefits to be reaped from the effort.? A good starting point is to read the creation and organization of SPPs in PCPM, Professional Development, Beyond Oral History – The Importance of a Club Operations Plan.

For more useful ideas and information, check out the wide range of highly integrated and widely acclaimed Professional Development, Operational, and Training Resources at the PCPM Marketplace Store.