In theory, we should be living in the golden age of member service. However, no shortage of anecdotal evidence exists to show customer service is degrading across the broad spectrum of businesses in America. How often have we heard: “Your call is very important to us. Operators are currently busy servicing other customers. Please hold . . .”
Today, many businesses are offering less service, e.g. self-service checkout at the supermarket, as the principal means of improving service. At the same time, private clubs are finding that doing the little things that make for really exceptional personal service—responding to members quickly, handling out of the ordinary requests with grace—is the distinguishing attribute of the private club experience.
Why, then, are most club leaders fretting about their club’s ability to sustain excellent member service?
Then vs. Now
Simply put, the successful operation of a private club is a “talent game.” And without “talent” of sufficient quality and in sufficient numbers, the delivery of exceptional personal service is impossible. Recruiting staff members with a strong service orientation has long been a challenge, but in the last five years, attracting enough staff—of any quality—has proven no easier a task.
The best clubs need a strong team to support excellent facilities, offer excellent member service, and provide member value. In the recent past, a club manager might devote a significant share of his/her time to facility master planning, membership development or any of the other myriad tasks involved in running a private club.
Today, it is the recruitment, development and retention of a strong team that consumes the lion’s share of a club leader’s time. Few club managers can remember a time when building a strong team was more challenging—or more important.
“Even in one of the most densely populated parts of the U.S., we couldn’t staff our club without recruiting internationally,” says Kevin Vitale, the general manager of Baltusrol Golf Club in Springfield, N.J. “We pay above market wages, offer excellent benefits, provide housing for some of our staff, and still struggle to attract the caliber of employee that we need.”
When I first became a club manager in 1990, staffing a club was relatively uncomplicated, at least by today’s standards, though it wasn’t easy. Quantity wasn’t an issue, but quality was elusive. We operated our club with a mixture of full-time, part-time and seasonal employees, with a handful of independent contractors thrown in. The full-time staff was dominated by “old timers,” such as staff with five or more years of club tenure who would likely spend their entire career on the front lines in the golf, tennis, club or food service operations. Our substantial part-time staff was largely made up of high school and college students, earning money to pay for school. Our seasonal staff had a similar make up.
In the early nineties, attracting talented staff wasn’t easy, but we found placing ads in the local newspaper was sufficient to fill most positions. For senior management positions, we might rely on listings with professional associations, with a prospect occasionally produced through the “grapevine.” For some positions, professional recruiters might be used.
Almost all (98 percent) of our staff spoke English as their first language. Compensation was barely competitive within the larger hospitality industry. Benefits were better than in other areas of hospitality, and while limited in scope (health insurance and paid vacation), benefits were fully funded by the club.
Today, 18 years later, the changes in the staffing landscape are profound.
The club I now manage serves a community where unemployment has not exceeded 3 percent since 1996. Many of our full-time employees are club “lifers,” but a significant number are younger, well-educated supervisors who view working in clubs as their profession, but perhaps not their career. Many of our part-time and seasonal staff members are students, but we’ve found, even in a university town, not enough college students are available to meet our needs for quantity, let alone quality.
Our staff also has a strong international flavor today, and even the newest entry-level supervisor has some fluency in the alphabet soup of visa types—J-1, H2B, H1B, H2R—not to mention a vocabulary that may include a few words of Chinese, Spanish, French or Burmese.
A combination of seasonal workers, student interns and refugees from abroad, placed by the local office of an international agency that resettles refugees, produce a diverse, multi-lingual workforce. In fact, a casual walk through our break room at lunch might allow you to hear a dozen or more languages being spoken.
And, while competitive wages are still a must, we’re finding that offering a comprehensive array of benefits, usually partially but not solely funded by the club, is absolutely necessary to attract and retain talent. For example, today we offer English as a Second Language classes at four levels, taught on site, for our staff. We also offer Spanish instruction.
Bringing in the Best
As our staff demographic has changed, so has recruitment, which has now become a complex, year-round activity that involves nearly every supervisor, in partnership with a Human Resources Department of two plus a payroll and benefits administrator.
Although help-wanted ads in the local newspaper still play a role, we’ve found some resources are wisely invested in electronic alternatives like HCareers and Yahoo Hot Jobs. Industry-specific, school and association Web sites are effective for some positions, too, and relationships with schools can be of great value.
We fill many positions in golf, tennis, golf course maintenance, food and beverage and other clubhouse positions through established internship programs with American and European universities. Typically, we have 10-15 undergraduate and graduate students doing one-year internships in a variety of departments. Over time, we’ve learned that the successful recruitment and placement of international hires requires good working relationships with a number of international student placement agencies.
The Staffing Evolution
Despite all of this change, the most significant shift in the club mindset toward staff is one that I say emphasizes “the holistic and strategic.”
The cyclical and seasonal aspects of staffing have worn us down. We’ve spent too many spring seasons rushing to fill manpower needs identified yesterday or ambiguously defined last month.
Now, we view recruiting as a continuous activity rather than something we ramp up when a need arises. We’ve increased our involvement with the community and have done so strategically by targeting community service organizations to which we can offer something. By offering paid and unpaid internships for youth at risk, teaching resume writing classes for newly resettled refugees, and providing interview counseling for adults re-entering the workforce, we’ve established partnerships within our community that will produce job candidates over time.
We also have managers involved as volunteers with area high schools, vocational schools, community colleges and universities, with roles that showcase our volunteers’ strengths and put them in contact with students who may one day want to work for us.
We’ve also come to view job design as a dynamic process. In the past, we would identify our job needs and look for people to fill those jobs. Today, we look at predictable types and sources of talent and try to design jobs that can be filled.
For example, filling entry-level supervisory positions in our clubhouse was a challenge. We learned that by redesigning some supervisory positions, they could be filled by international interns. This change improved the caliber of supervisors and allowed us to then develop a one-year management training program for graduates of American hospitality programs, providing us with a stream of seasoned talent for the next level of management. When a management or supervisory position opens up, more often than not, we have an internal candidate ready, or nearly ready, to fill the position.
The evolution of the private club industry’s view of staffing conceals one great irony: studies consistently demonstrate the single most effective source of new employees is referrals from existing staff. We’ve had more than a third at my club alone.
So, the question then becomes, how do you create an environment in which your existing employees recruit their friends and family to come work at your club?
That is a topic for another manager to address.
Philip Kiester, CM, is the general manager of Farmington Country Club in Charlottesville, Va., and a director on NCA’s board.