TOTAL QUALITY PRACTICES AT RITZ CARLTON

“Ritz Carlton treats quality as the heart beat of the company”

Employee Engagement
Ritz Carlton carefully selects and trains its employees to be quality engineers capable of
spotting defects and immediately correcting them. Employees receive 126 hours of annual
training on quality issues. Ritz management believes that high quality personnel reduce costs
because they do the job right the first time. The company reinforces its employee
improvements program by recognizing superior individual performance. Annual raises are
tied to the individual’s level of performance and work teams share in bonus pools when
solutions they recommend for quality issues are successfully implemented
Management empowers employees to ‘move heaven and earth’ to satisfy customers.
Whenever a customer complaint or a service problem arises, employees are expected to take
immediate corrective action. Employees have total authority to do what it takes to satisfy
customer needs without waiting for management direction.
Leadership
At each level of the company-from corporate leaders to managers and employees in the
individual work areas–teams are charged with setting objectives and devising action plans,
which are reviewed by the corporate steering committee. In addition, each hotel has a
designated quality leader, who serves as a resource and advocate as teams and workers
develop and implement their quality plans. To cultivate employee commitment further, each
work area is covered by three teams responsible for problem solving, strategic planning, and
setting quality-certification standards for each position.
Reports
Daily quality production reports, derived from data submitted from each of the 720 work
areas in the hotel, serve as an early warning system for identifying problems that can impede
progress toward meeting quality and customer-satisfaction goals. Coupled with quarterly
summaries of guest and meeting-planner reactions, the combined data are compared with
predetermined customer expectations to improve services
Appraisal
A valuation is done using the gold standards. Performance reviews are just recertifications
after personnel become qualified, enabling training to become an ongoing activity. People are
asked to participate in the process by identifying issues and working to address them.