Staff at the Taj Mahal Palace hotel in Mumbai gave a new meaning to customer service when they saved hotel guests during a 2008 gun--battle — and now Harvard Business School wants to know whether other companies could learn.
The luxury hotel was the scene of a pitched fight between Islamist gunmen and Indian soldiers on Nov. 26, 2008, trapping guests and staff.
Yet staff stayed in the burning building and did everything to shepherd out guests. A total of 31 people died, including 12 employees.
“Underlying the case is a central conundrum: Why did the Taj employees stay at their posts, jeopardizing their safety in order to save hotel guests?” said a new study, Terror at the Taj: Customer-Centric Leadership, released this week. “And is this level of loyalty and dedication something that can be replicated and scaled elsewhere?”
The study by Harvard Business School professor Rohit Deshpande explores workplace culture in India.
Compared to the West, -employers have a much more “paternalistic” relationship with their employees, while length of service is recognized and honored by top management, the study said.
However, “not even the senior managers could explain the behavior of these employees,” Deshpande told the business school’s Web site Working Knowledge.
“In the interview, the vice chairman of the company says that they knew all the back exits: the natural human instinct would be to flee. These are people who instinctively did the right thing., and in the process, some of them, unfortunately, gave their lives to save guests,” Deshpande said.
The study — which has not yet been made public in full — found a “unique” employee culture at Tata Sons, the Taj’s parent company, including an “exacting process for selecting, training and rewarding Taj employees for their work.”
Hotel general manager Karambir Singh Kang, whose wife and two young sons died that day, said he felt like the captain of a ship.
“I think that’s the way everyone else felt, too,” Kang said. “A sense of loyalty to the hotel, a sense of responsibility to the guests.”
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