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Putting people power to work
Hospitality industry executive Tommie Liem keeps top of mind the role of human resources in ensuring the best bottom line
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ospitality industry executive Tommie Liem keeps top of mind the role of human resources in ensuring the best bottom line.
The Indonesian expatriate is no longer a rarity, with more candidates displaying the skills and smarts to compete with their foreign peers, particularly in the hospitality industry. Tommie Liem, the new corporate development officer at ARTOTEL Indonesia, is one Indonesian who has accrued diverse overseas work experience during the past 18 years.
His resume includes stints at the Ritz-Carlton in the Middle East, a Bangkok hotel project, a huge ski resort development in Azerbaijan and with the Accor group in his homeland.
'To understand how people work in other parts of the world, we need to go there and see it for ourselves. To compete, we need to understand other people's perceptions in seeing things. Otherwise, we will not see who we are competing against,' said Tommie, 36.
Ultimately, from all his international experience, he attributes an institution's worth to the talent who work for it; he returns over and over again during the interview to the pivotal role of human resources.
'What I like about hospitality is that it depends on human talent, and I am a people person.'
He cites the Azerbaijan project, a government project whose 6,000 workforce mostly consisted of locals with no previous service industry experience.
'Ninety percent of the people were non-educated, they were farmers who had never seen a five-star restaurant in their lives, let alone knowing the difference between a fish fork and a regular fork,' he said.
'It was quite challenging. But I see this as one of the most important moments in my career; the government wanted to help develop the region and improve the local people's quality of life, and we were there to educate them and take them to another level.'
The son of a businessman from Kediri, East Java, it was expected that he would go into the family business. But he says he always likes to go against the flow in his choices.
'When people heard about my decision to have a career in hotels, they would give a weird look and ask, 'why?'. But I always believed that hospitality is a very lucrative business; it is, after all, the second oldest profession in the world.'
Tommie's entry into the industry came by chance, after he had finished his second year at the STP hospitality school in Nusa Dua, Bali, in the mid-1990s. The Ritz-Carlton Group was about to open its property on the resort island and the student was recruited for a week as a translator for job applicant interviews.
'Almost 10,000 people showed up. I always remember that they treated every single person the same way.'
He continued to gain work experience with the hotel, starting from the bottom in housekeeping and other departments before becoming the concierge on the Club Level designated for high-end customers.
Four days after graduating from hospitality school he was offered a position at Ritz-Carlton Dubai, although he jokes that he did not know where to locate the city on the map. By the age of 22, he was the hotel's Club Level manager ' the youngest and only Asian at the time.
'The team needs to understand what they need to do, but it's not the same for every person in the team'
'I was blessed with a very good team in Dubai. I had members from 48 different nationalities. For two years in a row, we had 100 percent satisfaction from our customers. The Ritz-Carlton came to us and asked us to share it with other hotels. So I was sent to other Ritz-Carlton hotels to help them get the same results,' he said of his shift from operations to learning and development.
His enduring principles from his eight-year stint with Ritz-Carlton is the importance of regularly gauging customer and employee satisfaction ' and how both combined affect the profit-loss statement.
Decision making
Tommie is a firm believer in treating fellow employees with respect. He is also pragmatic in his approach to managing people. He says it must not be forgotten that every employee has a responsibility to fulfill individual obligations to the company, and a supervisor must be transparent about what is expected.
'If I am unhappy about your performance, and you are not doing the job we agreed upon, you will know it and I will tell you. We're not in school anymore, where a mistake is on you personally. This affects the company,' he said.
'If an employee makes a mistake once, I say, learn from it. If they do it twice, well, I have to warn them. And if they do it three times, then we probably need to talk about the future.'
From his diverse experience in Asia and the Middle East, including as the general manager of the K108 Hotel Doha, working with a united nations of peoples, he also realizes a cookie-cutter approach does not work for all team members.
'The team needs to understand what they need to do, but it's [understanding and perception] not the same for every person in the team, which I think a lot of leaders do not understand. It is affected by their backgrounds and their purpose in taking the job, whether they come from Korea, an African country or Australia,' he said.
'And that should influence how we approach them.'
Tommie contends that an organization must offer opportunities for professional development, even if the approach may be met with resistance. He recalls his experience with Accor Asia Pacific as its corporate human resources adviser, opening 11 hotels in Indonesia in a 1.5-year period.
He realized that the prevailing service charge policy ' providing equal distribution among all employees in the name of fairness ' was 'a human resources time bomb'. A steward at a five-star hotel in Bali, he says, with a salary of about Rp 1 million, could take home an additional Rp 8 million from the service charge.
'From our perspective, you are creating a complacent employee who can work with no risk or challenge. They continue in the same position and at the same salary, just doing whatever they do,' he said.
The hotel adopted a new system based on points rewards for performance and job responsibility.
'At the end of the day, hospitality is about people. We as a company that operates the hotel should always be providing the platform for learning and developing, allowing employees to gain more skills while doing their current job. So the steward is taught how be a waiter, and from a waiter to be a front office agent, and so on,' he said.
'We give them the training and education to develop. Most importantly, we give them the opportunity to have cross exposure. For all hotels, it will be more profitable to have employees who can do multi-tasks, because they can always give a uniform answer to the guests.'
Tellingly, he said, profits increased 10 percent.
He came across the ARTOTEL in Surabaya, with its unique contemporary art and lifestyle hotel concept, on a visit home. The group also has ARTOTEL Thamrin Jakarta, with plans to open four more hotels in the next two years.
'Our vision is to support the emerging talent in Indonesia, and I want to be part of this very unique product,' he said.
It is another challenge in his career, but Tommie quips, 'A good sailor needs to go through rough seas'.
And he know he need all hands on deck for success.
'I grew in this job not simply from my experience, but from the people I work with,' he said.
(Bruce Emond)
_____________________
At Ease
Art beat: I travel about 20 days a month, and whenever I can I love to visit places that showcase interesting and emerging art talent in Indonesia. The art here is amazing, and is on an international level. But that is not only the case for art; I have met so many talented people recently who are interested in making a better Indonesia.
Time outs: I do sport such as swimming and go to the movies. I also hang out with friends who share the same interests, especially art, and grab a coffee with new ones. And I meet my family, that is very important. I love Asian food, particularly Chinese, Japanese and Korean, and also French cuisine. And of course I love Indonesian food. I have eaten so much of it since I came back.
