Toast

Many of us who have had breakfast in hotels are familiar with a device known as a conveyor toaster. Wherever bread is served, there’s usually one of these standing by, ready to toast bread slices to a soft golden hue in a nonstop sequence to the delight of sleepy guests.

Except it never does. For whatever reason, the toast is never toasted properly. One pass along the conveyer is too little, and two passes too much. But over time customers have lived to accept this disappointment and restaurant staff to limit their responsibility to turning the thing on and off.  The conveyor toaster, invented some time in the 1930’s and unimproved since, makes someone a lot of money.

For me it provides a valuable analogy for the approach to organisational culture that prevails in many businesses. The leadership team knows they need to provide ‘toast’ to customers, so every ‘good’ company must have a toaster. It should be efficient and at least as good looking as any that their direct competitors offer.

Senior management takes that brief and purchases the kind of toaster the rest of the category uses, because conformity is less risky than innovation. Junior management are familiar with the toaster concept but don’t invest any time working out how to set it, or train employees for consistent performance. They require the toaster to be on at the beginning of the shift and off at the end, because that’s what QHSE demands.

Staff members come to work to earn their pay, and monitoring a conveyor toaster is the least of their worries. So no one takes responsibility for it. The only time they notice it is when a customer is frustrated and angry or the dining room is full of smoke - quite literally a fire-fighting approach. Customer engagement is usually limited to expressing commiseration - often shaking their heads in time with the customer and wondering how the hotel could be so misguided as to have installed something that doesn’t work. Customers, as we have noted, become inured to disappointment and often choose not to bother with toast at breakfast.

And so the cycle of tolerable disappointment continues for decades and becomes an expected part of customer experience.

Recently I addressed a regional conference of HR professionals on the subject of using emotional intelligence to drive culture change. I offered them a variety of tools to try out, and a roadmap based on our experience of the past decade. They listened intently, asked some good questions and shared some experiences. The question is, how much longer will they ignore the toaster in the room?