Digital Transformation and Collaborating with new Hybrid teams to strengthen Culture and Foster Accountability for Hotels
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Is digital transformations urgent for hotels today?
Let’s face it all hotels today are digital, customers are digital, and their community is digital. And COVID-19 accelerated the importance of a digital presence for everyone.
I researched digital transformation back to 2017 when it became a buzzword and started trending among brands. And it was not hard to find content that indicated the urgency of digital transformation at the time.
Until the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020, there were no revolutionary digital transformations that were happening.
The biggest impacts for hotel brands in the time frame came from digital disruptions. New experience offers like Airbnb and Uber were starting to tap into the hotel industry's customer pool.
Airbnb and Uber did not confine themselves to regulations or a bureaucratic process. They went straight to the markets and asked how can we work with you.
The market responded and started collaborating with brands like Airbnb and Uber to co-create new experiences that meet new digital wants and needs.
In this article, I will show you how your hotel can achieve the same as Airbnb and Uber have done.
But before we jump into that I will give you the short answer to the question “Are digital transformations urgent for hotels today?”
The short answer is NO! I will show you why in this article. Let’s jump right into it.
Digital Transformation and Collaborating with new Hybrid teams to strengthen Culture and Foster Accountability for Hotels
Digital transformation represents a process where people and technology work in harmony to transform existing traditional and non-digital processes and services or create new ones. Today this is a process that completely alters the way hotels are managed and operated, and how value is delivered.
If you treat this process with urgency and importance then you will end up comprising every little component of what digital transformation is all about. Urgency and importance are about managing crises and pressing concerns.
Within the digital transformation process, hotels need to focus on what is important and not urgent. This is about creating a system that focuses on strategies and value innovation.
With my digital transformation framework I have created a simple system that focuses on;
1.???Discover what you have and be thankful
2.???Build relationships and make friends first
3.???Unlock new possibilities with embedded hospitality
4.???Collaborate with the community
5.???Optimize, be thankful and celebrate
Discover what you have and be thankful
One important aspect of taking your hotel to a new level through digital transformation is to understand what your hotel has that enables you to meet today’s wants and needs.
With value innovation, we create a system that focuses on cost efficiency and differentiation.
Don’t make the mistake to start focusing on what your hotel doesn’t have. This will lead to urgency and importance where you end up comprising the digital transformation process. And this is not a very cost-effective process.
Start with a digital audit of the people and technology your hotel has. Understand the current skillset of your hotel team.
A lot of the current hotel technology is in silos. And the minimum requirement is that your hotel team members have the relevant skills to understand and operate the technology within their department. Most internal training programs should satisfy this requirement, if not your hotel has a problem.
This is why it is important to understand what you have and be thankful. I use a checklist when I start a new digital transformation journey.
Build relationships and make friends first
Working with employees, customers, and the community. Start working on creating new training programs together. And introduce alternative training that supports differentiation, inclusiveness, diversity, and sustainability.
Introduce digital tools that help your hotel improve internal and external communication.
Implement training programs that improve employees’ skills and raise their spirits. Focus on alternative training that supports customer segments like autism, deaf, blind, PTSD, veterans, and people with disabilities.
Collaborate with your local community to introduce alternative training
Unlock new opportunities with embedded hospitality
Start unlocking new potentials helping people with the confidence to act. Creating a system that recognizes people for their intellectual and emotional worth, building trust, and inspiring voluntary cooperation.
Embedded hospitality includes collaborating on co-design, co-creation, co-working, co-production, co-marketing, co-distribution, and co-funding.
And embedded hospitality aims to be regenerative, aligning with becoming more inclusive, diverse, sustainable, social, and economic context in which your hotel operates, taking into account longer timeframes and a broader understanding of value innovation.
The future of embedded hospitality includes new advanced analytics that focuses on flexibility and agility that will help you to stay competitive, provide you with an opportunity for market leadership, and will set your hotel brand apart as an innovator.
Collaborate with the community
Collaboration is the heart of digital transformation. Collaborate with employees, customers, and the community to reduce friction. Create a system that identifies the factors of disproportionate influence on your hotel.
First and foremost you have to empower your employees by working with them through this process. Then identify key people among customers and the community that wants to work with your hotel. Assign ownership and accountability in context with co-creations.
Embedded hospitality champion’s processes that take advantage of what your local community has to offer. Identify new creative ways to make local businesses part of your hotel experience.
A key to collaboration is to understand what new customer segments want and need from your hotel. Does your hotel understand what a family that travels with an autistic child requires?
A lot of the technology today within hotels is in silos. Before making any investments and bringing your hotel's technology into a new era collaborate with employees, customers, and the community to understand what they want and need.
Optimize, celebrate and be Thankful
Data and research found that the benefits brands received from digital transformation collaborations were up to 4x revenue gain and 13x profit growth. And these brands are better prepared and more resistant to new challenges worldwide.
Create unprecedented value that opens a new value-cost frontier. Differentiate with a thankful portal with digital thanks. Measure what your hotel gives.
Embedded hospitality includes collaborating on co-design, co-creation, co-working, co-production, co-marketing, co-distribution, and co-funding.
领英推荐
Start to optimize with your employees, customer, and community. Celebrate all the small wins together, and be thankful.
How hotel should leverage new hybrid teams
The digital transformation framework implements collaboration in new ways that help hotels create unique, unexpected, and exciting experiences for employees, customers, and their community by freeing up resources to focus on new ideas through value innovation and a growth mindset.
Before collaboration
Digital customer acquisition has been a linear and static process where the hotel has used most digital channels through a traditional focus on commodities like price, quality, service, and features.
Connections and communication are often at a minimum in this process. Customers have set perceptions of what they expect from the hotel. And the hotel follows its service standards to assure these perceptions are met.
And extended communications with customers tend to happen when there is a concern.
In a process like this most hotels are comfortable with digital silos. And often this is hindering digital transformation efforts.
After collaboration
Embedded hospitality is a new way for hotels to collaborate with employees, customers, and the community.
Digital transformation thrives in a dynamic environment. When hotels focus on digital transformation and value innovation this is a process that will become more cost-effective and differentiate you from the competition.
Create a community day where employees visit the local community to learn more about what it has to offer and how this will add value to the hotel-embedded hospitality.
Start utilizing new digital tools in day-to-day operations to improve internal and external communication.
Implement new digital training programs and alternative digital training programs. Empower your hotel employees by improving their skills and helping them find their true passion to serve.
Happy employees are more productive and they will volunteer to embrace the digital transformation process. They will also ensure that your hotel's service promise is delivered throughout the entire customer journey.
Hotel leaders today must pay special attention to how culture, trust, motivation, and interpersonal connections are created and maintained within a new environment.
The future of digital customer acquisition is earned through a community that trusts your hotel.
Digital hybrid teams support a flexible and dynamic process. Put more trust in people than what is comfortable.
The idea is to transform a group of people into a community that more or less works like an extended exceptional hybrid team that drives new revenue, profit, and growth for your hotel.
Collaboration fosters accountability and a new culture for hotels
Through collaborations employees, customers, and the community will take ownership of the process. With a focus on value innovation and co-creation the employees, customers, and community will help your hotel with creating a new culture for the future.
A collaborative culture facilitates broader involvement and more deliberative processes for your hotel.
Digital Transformation Framework Partnership for Hotels
Hotels today have to invest in people and technology in a context that adds value to everyone involved.
Don’t continue to neglect or take the people's transformation for granted. Technology is a digital tool that will help your hotel when implemented in collaboration with your employees.
Partner with your employees and they will help with retaining and hiring people.
I also invite you to work with me as your hotel partner to help implement a new innovative digital transformation framework that opens the digital gateways to more direct bookings without competing with the OTA.
Through value innovation, I help hotels with cost-effective alternatives that are focused on eliminating and reducing factors the hotel industry competes on. I also help lift employee and customer value by raising and creating elements that hotels never offered before.
Shoot me an email at: [email protected]
Are Morch?is a digital transformation coach helping hotels open their digital front door, reimagine their processes and culture, and transform experiences in a fast-paced world!
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