Regent gets to the heart of it

Related tags People Customer service Jongleurs

Meeting Marlene Collins for the first time is like opening the door of the farm house to a driving blizzard. Collins is a professional breath of...

Meeting Marlene Collins for the first time is like opening the door of the farm house to a driving blizzard. Collins is a professional breath of fresh air.

Regent Inns has installed her at its Muswell Hill head office in north London as "specialist training consultant" in which role she has the chutzpah to talk about hearts.

Any mention of hearts, unless they are braised in gravy, are apt to make most grown business executives stare at their shoes and pick strands of invisible cotton from the sleeves of their suits. Collins, however, is unembarrassed.

The heart, which beats behind your wallet, is the first H in the training programme she has named H3, the other two being the head and the hands. Regent is currently putting all its pub managers through an intensive four-day worskhop, the precise details of which are, for some reason, top secret.

The company will only hint that the classes are "fun and interactive" which leads you to imagine those exercises in which the participants have to pretend they are trees in a high wind or allow themselves to be led blindfolded around the room by a complete stranger.

How ever they do it, Collins gives the irresistible impression that these are four days of cerebral rough and tumble in which the wheels of industry are bounced out of their ruts, preconceptions are shaken loose and people are made to look again at what they are doing and who they are doing it to.

To what end? It's that old chestnut customer service. The theory is that this hangs not merely on setting standards but on the genuine happiness of those who are doing the serving, the pub's staff. And a lot of what makes them happy is down to the way their boss behaves towards them.

The way they feel - the heart - affects the way they think - the head - and ultimately their work - the hands.

"We need to make sure that the way our people are managed and the way we communicate with them does not demotivate them," explained Collins. "Most of them are enthusiastic when they start - then, too often, we set about pulling the plugs one-by-one.

"We have got some talented people and we have to exercise their emotional commitment and their intellect. The heart is the starter motor. You have to manage the heart first through the way you communicate and your management style.

"Eighty-five per cent of pulled plugs are pulled by managers. We have to make our managers more aware of what keeps the light shining in people's eyes."

H3 is not just for those out in the pubs, but for head office managers too. Collins puts it with characteristic bluntness: "we can't afford to have even two bastards. One rotten e-mail will put people off".

"It is also a matter of searching for new and better ways of doing things in all areas of the business, of using everyone's brains. A lot of companies squander the potential they have in their people."

Collins came to Regent with a background in management training with Grand Met and several years as a casino manager in Atlantic City. Her philosophy comes, she says, from "watching and listening".

"I want to get people to self-learn as much as possible or they become dependent on you. I've seen people rise from working behind a bar to operations director. The ones who can do that are self-critical. Their greatest teacher is themselves."

Letting a little of the secret out, she explained that the practical core of the H3 course is training in problem-solving. Once they have completed it - and the results so far, reflected in the comments of the licensees below, have given her encouragement. The participants not only take the lessons back to their pubs but, in many cases, have been immediately recruited onto project teams to apply their new skills to issues at the centre of Regent's business.

Project work has mostly been in the area of human resources, creating policies on processes and structures which feed into and reinforce the more touchy-feely aspects of H3 itself.

Teams have considered recruitment criteria - that is, how they select people to work for them, staff performance appraisal, rewards and recognition, training frontline staff and career progression within Regent Inns.

They have also covered customer service standards and the definition of retail brands, including Bar Monaco, Bar Risa and the new Town House concept.It might sound as if Collins is trying to do everything at once, but that, typically, is her whole idea. You can't skin a tiger claw by claw and you can't change a company culture bad habit by bad habit.

"This way we get a cohesive policy, process and HR strategy. It's logical, elegant and quite exciting. No company in this industry is, to my knowledge, doing anything quite as sexy.7

"We aim to develop a common way of behaving and thinking throughout Regent Inns," she said. "It will be an open culture. Fear of saying what you think will disappear. There will be a lot more thank-yous and no taking people for granted.

"It's to do with understanding those insecurities that everyone has, creating a supportive culture, making people feel good about each little leap they make in their careers.

"You can be too obvious about that, though, and you need to do it cunningly. It's a kind of tough love. Everyone has potential, but you have to feed and water it."

If this sounds a bit woolly liberal, Collins is also mad keen on "intellectual rigour". "We already have a belief here in intellectual rigour, people just need coaching in it.

"There is a tendency to react to problems without thinking them through. Thinking about what you are going to say to someone, a member of staff who has done something wrong, perhaps, saves you time in the long run, and it's the same with problem-solving.

"It's common sense really," she continued. "All I am doing is bringing back a healthy dose of customer service.

"When I came here, everyone probably thought I was from Mars - you always get that. But by now I reckon 80 per cent of people are up for it. It's like driving a bus. At every stop you wonder how many are going to get on.

"Success will come when they don't need me so much. It all becomes the air that people breathe."

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