5-Star-Hospitality Scrum
Is there a place for Scrum in a 5-Star luxury resort in Vietnam when the following conditions are true:
- A general manager who micro-manages everything and everyone because he doesn’t trust his department managers
- A rigorous, authoritarian top-down structure of Command&Control, totally resistant to change
- A resort culture that expects employees to follow, not think, not experiment and fail safely
- A work culture that punishes mistakes by possible wage deductions
Is there a place for Scrum in such an environment? Well, No is the obvious answer.
I tried anyway..
Some Background
After a year of travelling through South and East Asia, my wife and I got stuck in central Vietnam. We have been to Vietnam before, but this time was different. We had more time than our usual 2 weeks holidays and the longer we stayed, the more we fell in love with the people and the country.
We decided to stay a bit longer, but I was eager to work after traveling for so long. For a couple of months I volunteered as a Scrum Master at an online magazine aimed at tourists and expats called Hoi An now! And this was a great experience and is worth another blog post. It’s nice to volunteer and make a difference, but at some point you want some $$ for your skills.
So I applied for a position at a 5-Star wellness resort and, what can I say?, I stayed for more than 2 years.
I wasn’t hired as a Scrum Master. If you want to get a work visa in Vietnam, you can’t go there and say “Yo, I’m into scrummin’ and continuous delivery, and I also have an affinity for value creation'”. Authorities wouldn’t recognise such a job. In a country where everything has to have a checkbox, a signature and a stamp (rather similar to Germany, now that I think about it), there wasn’t such a box for authorities to tick. If you start in hospitality you make use of the foreign languages you speak, so you either teach English to hotel staff or you start in guest relations.
So I started as a guest relation manager, but in reality I wore many hats while working there. I was the resort photographer, I was the English teacher for 200 hotel staff, I supported the marketing department with graphic designs when the in-house designer was overwhelmed, I helped out in the F&B (Food&Beverage) department, I was the assistant staff training manager, I was a Scrum Master in disguise, and soon became the right hand man of the general manager. But until I became all this I was in
SHOCK
I will never forget the very first status meeting I was in. It involved all 13 Head of Departments (HODs). So for example the Head of Housekeeping, Head of Maintenance, F&B, Kitchen, Training, HR, Marketing, Sales etc.
It’s a daily meeting starting at 9am and on bad days it lasted until 11am. On good days 10.30. It was the very definition of waste on a daily basis. Wasted time, wasted money, wasted energy, wasted resources in general and worse, it was the general manager literally shouting, screaming, exploding at his department managers on a daily basis. For the slightest mistake. Full explosion. Top of the lungs style. I had never seen anything like it. So when I witnessed this for the first time, in this very first meeting, on my very first day, I was honestly shocked, mouth open, witnessing real staff abuse right in front of my eyes.
6 minutes into this madness I was convinced my first day was my last day. No way I would work for this man. And the worst thing was, he would never shout at the few Western managers who worked there. Only at the Vietnamese. What an absolute dick.
But I also noticed something else: The Vietnamese managers he shouted at had this glazed look in their eyes. As if they were far, far away in a different place. I could tell they were used to the shouting, and they tuned out, muted him, only once in a while responding with “Yes, Sir” and “Sorry, Sir” as if remote controlled. I hadn’t noticed this in the very first meeting, I was too shocked, but when the shouting continued the next day I noticed it. They shrugged it off. What amazing people.
For some reason I did not quit.
When I asked one of the staff on the way to the canteen about the shouting, she shrugged and said, that’s just the way he is. The GM is actually OK, he has a good heart, and for the shouting, no one cares. The people who had been at the resort for some time didn’t take him seriously and there was such a strong bond between the Vietnamese staff that they all supported each other. To say I was astonished would not quite hit it. I decided there and then, rather than to quit, it would be a nice challenge to change the system and improve working conditions for everyone from the inside.
Gaining trust with the General Manager
He could tell I disapproved of his management style by just looking at me. And yes, I couldn’t hide it. I didn’t even try. I even told him as much. I didn’t care. I was not depended on this job and I wanted to make clear, the moment he shouts at me I’m gone. He never did. But I knew he was watching me closely. To drive change, I first had to gain his trust and have more time.
I never taught English before, but there I was, responsible for the English development of 200 staff with an age range of 18 – 62 from all departments. From people with no English skills like Kitchen staff and Housekeeping, to advanced English speakers like Receptionists, Marketing and Sales.
I figured out pretty quickly some disadvantages of hiring an English teacher. Usually the English teachers are travelers who take the job, charge the resort a lot of money, teach for some months and then they go back to Australia, or the US, or the UK. Then training stops. It can take weeks if not months to find a new teacher (there was a break of 6 months when the last English teacher left and before I got hired). In the meantime, there is no English class for staff and most progress is lost.
So I developed a Website with English lessons bespoke to the resort, similar to Duolingo, just not quite as elaborate. It featured pictures of staff inside the various English lessons for motivation, English mini games, and it could be accessed by staff 24/7, so training never stops.
The English teacher is off sick? Visa denied? On holiday? Quit? Doesn’t matter. Staff could always access the website for lessons that were tailored to the resort. I also tracked who would log on to the site, what was studied and for how long.
It took me 6 months to get this up and running including audio recordings of native speakers with various English accents, so that staff would know how to pronounce the English words and could understand guests from Ireland, Scotland, the US and Australia.
Needless to say the General Manager loved it, the staff had more fun learning, the overall English levels improved dramatically and most importantly guest satisfaction increased.
Sounds good, but wasn’t this blog post supposed to be about Scrum?
I’m getting there and I appreciate your patience.
The development of the English website gave me some breathing space and less classes to teach. The people with advanced English skills could use the site to just focus on pronunciation and new vocabulary and I would sporadically check if progress is made. That meant 4 departments that didn’t need me in person anymore.
The General Manager was now a big fan as this site saved him a lot of money and eliminated the urgency of finding a new teacher every time someone leaves. Since I earned his trust I became his right hand man and finally started implementing change, starting with the dreaded status meeting that all the managers hated.
More than the shouting, the staff was annoyed about the time it took to listen to issues that didn’t concern them. Housekeeping issues were raised in the meeting while the Garden, Maintenance, Marketing, Sales, IT and Kitchen managers had to sit there and listen until a solution was found.
Daily waste on a breathtaking level.
So I suggested, rather than sitting comfortably in our leather chairs, we stand up. The General Manager saw this as a punishment for his managers and loved the idea. The managers hated me briefly, because now they had to stand, but guess what, the meetings took less than half the time they used to.
Next, I suggested that the department managers only “report” what they did yesterday, the plan for today, what’s blocking them and whatever was blocking them will be discussed after the status meeting with the relevant departments. You see where I’m going with this? Meeting time further cut substantially.
Then I introduced Trello and set up 13 simple Trello boards for the 13 departments:
To Do, Doing, Done, Blocked.
Seeing that the General Manager was so into micromanaging everyone, I set all 13 Trello boards up in a way that he got a notification for every task that was created, or moved, or resolved.
Then I waited.
Soon enough he begged me to make it stop. His Outlook was exploding with Trello notifications.
I made it stop and as a consequence his department managers could work more freely without the General Manager breathing down their necks all the time.
Next, the Marketing department. It was a mess. The computer screen of the Head of Marketing was covered in post-its. Behind her was a huge whiteboard, screwed to the wall, basically empty. You see where this is going?
She was so covered in work, she didn’t know what work to start first, so we used the whiteboard, created a backlog and prioritised it, followed by a Sprint planning session with her team, daily scrums, and a review, but we never got round to doing retrospectives. I was already focusing on the Sales department.
So, finally, to answer the initial question, would Scrum work in such an impossible environment?
No is the answer. Absolutely not. But elements of Scrum do, and those elements were enough to improve the lives of everyone involved by a factor of xxxxxxx.
And that was good enough for me.
Your team needs a Scrum Master?
Send me an email: achility(at)protonmail.com
