Bespoke hospitality services business Bennett Hay is successfully developing the ethos of the international hotel sector into UK facilities management, with training being a key element in this strategy. 

Bennett Hay provide guest services, food and wellbeing services and workplace support to clients such as HTC, Land Securities, Worldpay and EDF Trading. At the core of the Bennett Hay approach is a belief in the importance of behaviours, skills and colleague development. The company has created its ‘transformation training academy’ to deliver this new thinking. 

Bennett Hay addresses the realities of the FM business directly, our experience tells us that creating a truly integrated team, able seamlessly to deliver a range of services and add significant value to a contract, remains an aspiration rather than a reality for most FM providers. The ‘one-team’ approach proves difficult to achieve due to the very nature of FM contracts. Typically, an existing team keeps changing employers through an endless cycle of TUPE transfers, speedy mobilisation and new operational management. 

Existing team members can become deeply pessimistic about the prospects for improvement as they experience constant change but perceive little career progression. This unspoken mistrust may sustain counterproductive patterns of individual and team behaviours and prevent any significant move towards seamless one-team delivery. 

In designing the transformation academy, Bennett Hay has studied the training approaches of businesses with similar values that have consistently achieved superior levels of guest service. These include Ritz-Carlton, Apple and Firmdale boutique hotels. 

Each of these businesses offers particular insights for us. From Ritz-Carlton they have learnt lessons in how to select, train and inspire colleagues. Apple demonstrates the importance of attracting people who are passionate about the company’s products and training team members to get on with each other and enjoy working together. Firmdale capture detailed information about their guests in order to provide a highly personalised service. 

All of these businesses have some common features. They work hard on helping their teams understand their own profile and those of their guests or customers. They then make absolutely sure that their teams know their product and service inside out and that they truly believe in how good it is through personal experience. 

They also provide a very clear ‘journey’ for the guest, covering all the touch points where they will come into contact with the service, product or team. Apple is a good case in point here – anyone who has bought an Apple product will appreciate how much thought goes into the customer ‘experience’, from the retail store environment to the elegance of their website to the sleek simplicity of the packaging. 

We train and re-train our colleagues on each competency required for each job role. Most importantly there is a clear path for each colleague, we aim to make sure they all feel part of the same goal and are respected and rewarded for their individual contribution.