PERSONAL APPEARANCE AND GROOMING TRAINING

Guidelines
The hotel believes that all employees should maintain a high standard of personal grooming at all times. Before entering a front-of-the-house area, they should make sure that their personal grooming, hygiene, and the cleanliness of their uniform meets the hotel’s high standards. To ensure that the hotel’s Personal Appearance and Grooming Standards are maintained at all times, and that all employees understand their relevance and importance, it is recommended that briefings, meetings, and training courses are used to encourage the employees to meet the standards from the heart.

Recommendations

1. General Staff Orientation: The General Staff Orientation provides the first opportunity to train a new employee about the hotel’s Personal Appearance and Grooming Standards and to show the employee photographs of what is and is not acceptable.
2. Culture Orientation: During the Culture Orientation, which will follow the General Staff Orientation, the Section Head will emphasise the importance and relevance of the standards to the employee’s department and job. For example, the importance of washing one’s hands after a break or going to the toilet should be explained to Food & Beverage staff in reference to food safety and preventing food contamination.
3. The Daily Briefing: It is recommended that the Section Head or his/her Assistant conducting the briefing inspects the staff at the briefing and rectifies any breaches of the grooming standards. The briefing also provides an opportunity to report any positive and negative comments from guests or management about the grooming standards of any hotel employee, and to encourage the employees to think and answer “why” the standards are important and relevant to themselves and to the hotel.
4. Team Meetings: Team meetings provide another opportunity to emphasise and train employees about the importance of maintaining the Personal Appearance and Grooming Standards.
5. English Language Classes: English classes are also an excellent opportunity to talk about the standards at various levels of language complexity.
6. Walking the Talk: One of the best ways to train the standards to the staff is to “walk the talk” by practising the standards. This will give credibility to the Department Manager’s comments about the importance of the standards, and make it more likely that the employees practise and maintain the standards fully.
7. Performance Evaluation: In order to emphasise the importance of practising the Personal Appearance and Grooming Standards, one section of employee performance evaluation is devoted to how well the employee has practised the standards.
8. Other Opportunities: Informal and formal one-on-one or group meetings between a Department Head or Team Leader and one or more employees, as well as any training course provide other opportunities to train employees about the grooming standards.