We’ve all encountered the “Authorised Personnel Only” sign at almost every place we visit. But Hyatt Regency Dubai is consciously minimising these places with a first-time-in-Dubai concept called the No Back of the House. The brain child of the former general manager of the hotel, Fathi Khogaly [he is now general manager at Grand Hyatt Dubai], the concept has opened up the back office to guests and outsiders.
Each office department from sales and marketing to administrative and human resources have created unique spaces for themselves which allows easy interaction and fun in the workplace. Taking a cue from Google, the revenue and marketing office comes complete with a basketball net, bean bags and yoga mats. A single large workstation sits on one side and is more of a boardroom meeting table with multiple computer terminals.
Move into the kitchen and you’ll be greeted by a wall full of chopping boards with erstwhile chefs of the hotel. Across The Avenue (we will come back to this) you enter the engineering and stewarding offices beyond which lies the human resources office. You can peek into the Galleria cinema from here. A naturally-lighted training room with more colourful bean bags and a large fish tank to create a relaxed atmosphere takes up one end of the hall.
A lounge designed as a cosy log cabin with a faux fire place, comfy sofas and chairs to sit and read in — from the library that lines one wall — or play games on the playstation, and swings for relaxed conversations over coffee (there’s a gourmet coffee machine on one counter), connects the engineering office and the human resources areas.
“At Hyatt Regency Dubai we have a very people-centric culture. We wanted to create an environment that reflects our philosophy: we care for people so they can be their best,” Khogaly told tabloid!. “Hence we decided to create an energised working atmosphere. We conceptualised perhaps the first of its kind No Back of the House experience in our hotel, which means that our employees and guests have the same kind of experience. We have made a workplace for colleagues which serves two purposes — helps us to take care of team members, which in return creates a positive work atmosphere thereby boosting productivity”.
Khogaly’s experiment seemed to work, as Michael Mendoza, director of engineering, who was in-charge of implementing the project, told us that at the end of it all the “net promoter score” or the guest satisfaction survey had gone up. Moreover, the staff survey showed that Hyatt Regency Dubai was the best property to work in with 95 per cent satisfaction of employees.
Interestingly, the execution was done in house too, and at a minimal cost, Khogaly informed us. Depending on the work area and the concepts, it took Mendoza’s team anywhere from three to seven weeks to re do each department, completing the entire project in just over two years.
“We had no experience doing renovations ourselves. But we were excited — the boss [Khogaly] wanted us to be self-reliant. Until you empower your staff, you never know they can actually do it,” said Mendoza.
Yes, Mendoza admitted there were several errors during execution early on. But Khogaly was patient, allowing them to finish each bit before handing them the next assignment. 15 people or so worked on the project, Mendoza said, mostly staff with a few hired experts, as they had their regular hotel maintenance to look after.
“We worked when we got free from our daily work. By the time a year had passed, we got good at it, so much so that we had budgeted two months to finish Casa de Jose but we finished it in five weeks. And The Avenue was done in seven weeks — way before time. The Casa de Jose table was made by us. I bought the timber from the shipbuilding yard. When we went shopping for chairs to match, we found a similar table cost Dh60,000. We had done it a fraction of that”.
Much of the material used to create the furniture was also recycled from older hotel and office furniture. Accessories were mostly locally accessed from Dragon Mart, The One, Dubai Garden Centre and other places.
Coming back to The Avenue. Designed like an English street market place with shop facades, it is the staff eatery which serves an international buffet at subsidised prices, not only to the staff but workers from The Galleria offices and shops. A Dr Who-style telephone booth will transfer you, well, not really into another time zone, but into a restroom (by the way the phone inside does work). The Avenue also comes with its own graffiti in one of its “back allies” — which, again, was done by a staff painter who made backdrops in the ballroom for events — and houses a quaint flower shop and the Casa de Jose, the cellar. Once a store room, the Casa is now a cosy space for intimate meals and work meetings.
“Interestingly one of the challenges [we faced initially] was that not everybody was ready to accept change as they had been working here for a long time. They did not even wish to participate in creating concepts,” said Mendoza. “The person who looked after the cellar did put up a resistance as he thought he wouldn’t have space for his barrels and bottles. We had to convince him that it would still serve as a store even though it will be a showroom for his wares”.
But with this concept, access is allowed to outsiders to places otherwise used only by staff. Will it not affect the security and working privacy of the back office, we ask Khogaly. For example, we were allowed a peep into the working of the hotel’s air-conditioning system during our tour.
“At Hyatt Regency Dubai providing good security is an integral part of our service. Our No Back of the House area can be accessed through doors which have a security code. The security team of our hotel assists with movement through the hotel for guests as well as visitors. Further a tour of this area is guided and a team member always escorts the visitors to the area,” Khogaly said.
For a tour of the No Back of the House facility, call 04-2091234.
