The Retour vers le Futur project that was implemented in Novotel gained different responses from its staff. Initially, most of the staff members were not quite motivated to do the project. They just wanted to wait and see and do it afterwards
Case Summary
Novotel was founded in 1967 by Paul Dubrule and Gerard Pellison, neither of whom came from a hotel background. Driven by an ambitious enterpreneurial spirit, they expanded they empire by building new hotels and buying existing hotel chains. This case study focuses on Novotel in Europe, where Novotel is the market leader with 214 Novotel in 18 countries. From the beginning when they opened their first hotel, Dubrule and Pellison approached hotel management differently from their competitors. Several distinctive innovation such standarized concept, employees that where trained to do a variety of tasks, and numbers of other inovative practices that have since become standard. However, as the Novotel Network expanded, control become problematic, and standards were slipping. By the late 1980s Novotel had grown immensely. In order to manage those dispersed hotels, an nine-layered management structure had evolved. 1990s brought a period of changing fortunes for Novotel. In the spring of 1992, there were signs of profit decline. In that year, Phillip Brizon and Gilles Pellison were named as the two new co-presidents of Novotel, and given a clear mandate to introduce major changes. The changes included selecting general managers, developing an assesment center, changing the structure and operations of the administrative corporate center, changing the internal structure, changing work routines, developing team works, developing progress groups, and trainings for reinforcing and cementing the changing routines and work practices of the organization.
Analysis
These analysis below are based on theories that are mentioned in Organizational Behavior, written by Kreitner and Kinicki.
Organizational Culture
The effort to discover Novotel’s cultural history insipired the achievement of new ideas and accord. It then helped the core management team to identify and recommend future directions for the organization. The team identified the need to place the hotel guest at the top of the organization. This identification led to some changes in Novotel. The problem was that the culture itself had already been faded during few decades of Novotel’s prosperity. To make the culture affect the organization effectively, they needed to use some mechanism to embed the culture to fit the current environmental situation. The mechanisms that can be used includes formal statements of organizational philosophy, vision, mission, values and materials used for socialization, the design of physical spaces, deliberating role modelling, and so on. Those mechanism involves teaching process in which the organizational members teach each other about the organization’s preferred values, beliefs, expectations, and behaviors. Some of these mechanism have already been used by the Novotel’s management, for example by informing their staff about the Retour vers le Futur project and introducing its principles into their Novotel. However, it was not easy to convice most of the staff members that the effort might work, and that the project was intended to help eliminate hierarchies, not to create them. Thus, we can say that there should be better ways that can be done to introduce the change.
