As a long time fan and regular contributor to ehotelier, and to many other daily hospitality e-magazines and blogs, Gordon Gorman, the long serving Scottish General Manager of Karachi’s leading five stars Hotel, the iconic Avari Towers, recently transformed the daily refreshing, but non productive Head of Department morning and afternoon tea breaks into supercharged e-breaks.
Traditionally, since the hotel opened its famous doors nearly thirty years ago, his twenty plus heads of departments and their assistants would get together in a corner of the hotel’s coffee shop at 10.30, and again at 16.00 to enjoy tea and leftover breakfast and lunch pastries, and of course a good chinwag and gossip about the previous days political and or cricket headlines.
While understanding and appreciating the very important role that TEA plays in good TEAM work at the hotel, Gorman decided to go ahead and replace these rather enjoyable but non productive work intermissions with an activity linked to their professional development, and to the hotel’s business development, and in doing so came up with the idea of the e-break instead of the tea break.
Now when the HOD’s arrive thirsty and stressed out for their hot caffeine and sugary sweet refreshments at 10.30, and again at 16.00, they are given the opportunity to also refresh their minds and their work habits by viewing on a large screen, various leading international hospitality websites daily newsletters, beginning with everyone’s favorite ehotelier, moving on to the CEO newsletter, HOTELS blogs, the Social Media Examiner, Larry Mogelensky’s Hotel Mogel and his excellent blog articles, plus Tripadvisor comments for our hotels and our competitors.
Each day a different HOD or assistant acts as presenter, which not only improves their own individual presentation skills, but also their knowledge of the Wide World of Hospitality which exists and thrives outside the hotel’s impressive bullet proof and blast proof doors.
The transformation according to Gorman has been amazing, i.e. from 30 minutes of drowsy down time each day into 30 minutes of supercharged fast track e-learning………………….. and earning.
About the Author
Gordon James Gorman is the General Manager of Avari Towers Karachi, Pakistan, and will complete five years of service to his colleagues, guests and owners in the summer of 2012.
