Prism Seeks To Better Understand Staff

By Adam Kirby, Associate Editor -- Hotels, 5/1/2008

Like a lot of hotel companies, Dallas-based Prism Hotels & Resorts has the stated goal of being the best employer in the industry. Easier said than done, of course, but Prism executives believed the key to being an attractive employer is to know, at all times, what its lower and mid-level staff is thinking and feeling.

It is relatively easy to measure other business objectives like market penetration and guest service scores, but gauging employee happiness is a bit more complicated, says Al Hatfield, Prism’s senior vice president of operations. To that end, the 19-property Prism tapped UniFocus to implement its StaffScope Web-based employee survey program.

StaffScope has helped Prism identify employee concerns and gain real-time information to help improve the company’s overall operations, Hatfield says. “It wasn’t just throwing a bunch of stuff against the wall—it was a very organized approach,” he says. “UniFocus was a good match because they have a very statistical point of view. They had some good measurement parameters that we felt could help us.” UniFocus created surveys specifically for Prism—questionnaires that employees are comfortable taking and which provide candid results, Hatfield says.

The first round of voluntary employee surveys was completed last fall, with a respectable 77% participation rate. The data and subjective responses were roughly in line with what company officials were expecting, Hatfield says. Nevertheless, it gives the company a baseline to try to improve employee contentedness, he says. The data is compiled into property-level employee satisfaction indices; how to address the data is up to each property.

Not surprisingly, the most common employee complaint is over pay. “If that’s what you’re looking to learn, you probably don’t need a survey for that,” Hatfield says. “If you’re looking for if employees are engaged, if they feel they have a career path, if they feel they’re part of the decision-making process, then [StaffScope] tests for that.”