The art of giving productive workers more work
How I ended up working four full-time jobs while being paid for one... aka the curse of Richard Branson
The early 1990’s were exciting times. In my world, the decade kicked off with the Oslo Peace Process, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, Gulf War 1, and the death and funeral of King Olaf V of Norway. It continued with hosting an official delegation from South Africa before the end of the apartheid regime, local labour disruptions, and the fact that our company almost went bankrupt. Thanks to a generously understanding parent company, or perhaps just the fact that our hotel was government-owned, we received a fax at the end of each month allowing us to borrow enough money from the parent company to pay salaries and meet other financial obligations.
As a newly divorced single person, I had extra time on my hands and extra energy to spend it with. So, obviously, I used all my time and energy to work. Our struggling company appreciated my work ethic because one of our key strategies was to grow ourselves out of the hole we were in. This included becoming a franchise partner with Carlson Companies for the Radisson brand as well as a franchisor for the brand in Europe and the Middle East and, later, Africa. The idea was to grow, grow fast and grow no matter what. Grow we did. Fast. At times, we were adding more than a hotel a week.
I once asked someone in our business development team what our strategy for finding new locations was.
“Developers call us. They tell us where they have a project. If we can find the place on a map, we say yes and go!”
Safety and security weren’t “important enough” to be a full-time position even though our growth included new markets that presented new challenges. My boss loved the idea of job combination. Booking agents could double up as receptionists during peak periods. Set up people in the banqueting department who could work in housekeeping and salespeople had marketing as part of their portfolio.
But what about the security guy? What could they use me for?
To begin with, my job combination was to run the local hotel security department and corporate safety and security at the same time. During one of the labour disputes that became quite heated, the union representing hotel staff decided that the security department should be blamed for all the troubles. They claimed that security staff spied on workers and shared information with management. (We didn’t.)
As things grew even more tense between management and the unionized workers the rhetoric got so bad that a member of parliament that I had never met claimed that I ran the security department like Goebbels ran the SS in nazi Germany. When I read that in a national newspaper, I was glad I was divorced and had no close family in the country.
The strikes included tactics such as hunger strikes by newly-arrived refugees from Sri Lanka to people we had never seen at the hotel carrying picket signs and lying down in front of delivery vehicles. Management and non-union staff kept the hotel open offering skeleton services with everyone pitching in to clean rooms and serve guests as best we could. I was especially proud of the employees in the security department who managed to take the high road throughout. This included offering sandwiches and fruit to the starving hunger strikers at night when the press and all the white Norwegian picketers had gone home. This was warmly welcomed by the striking staff who didn’t understand much of what was happening and said they were only following orders. The security staff was generously rewarded after the strike. Not in monetary terms, but by the entire staff of the hotel when, during elections for staff representatives to the hotel board, the two people who received the most votes were security guards. (Only one of them could serve on the board since one spot was reserved for a union representative.) My colleagues accepted this as a vindication of their efforts. If there ever had been issues between the security department and the general staff, they no longer existed.
After everything was resolved, I was “promoted” to a corporate position. I put promoted in “” because it may just have been a way to get me off the hotel management team and help heal the open wound with the union. People don’t easily forget when high-profile people compare you to Goebbels…
Security still “wasn’t important enough” to fill a full-time corporate role. As the CEO told me in full honesty, “I just can’t imagine what you would do all day.”
Job combination had to continue to be part of my role. But what?
Loyalty programmes had just become a common feature of the global travel scene. Being owned by an airline meant we were part of their programme. The economics of loyalty programmes is complicated and was not well understood.
Most people choose to earn their points at hotels in boring places like Luleå, Sweden and Lully, Switzerland and spend them at fancy resorts or cities like London or Paris.
The price of a hotel room is also much cheaper in a three-star hotel in a small town than in a five-star resort in paradise or a hotel in a global metropolis. Making the programme attractive whilst not unfairly punishing the small-town hotel and still compensating the big-city hotel fairly is a tricky business. It’s so tricky that after a year or two, we had hotels that paid more per night to ensure their guests got points than the room rates they were charging… I’m not sure how or who thought I could do anything about that, but it suddenly became my job to work with our chief marketing officer and regional director of accounting to fix this problem.
All while maintaining my role as head of corporate safety and security, of course.
Interestingly, the computer programme that tracked the loyalty programme activity was the same system that was used for tracking commission payments to travel agents. Two completely different things, but since it was on the same system, handling commission payments also became my responsibility. Once we fixed the economics of the loyalty programme, and I take no credit for that, it was all down to our chief financial officer, my job became one of forecasting. This was necessary, because, for a combination of legal and technical reasons, we had to report the monthly financial result of the programme about a week to 10 days before we could see the actual figures. We used last month’s real figures and calculated the forecast for this month and reported the result. Next month, we’d correct the reported figure to what had been the actual figure and then calculate the rest of the month as best we could.
It was challenging, but taught me a lot about looking at many different factors to forecast accurately, something that would serve me well in security later on.
One month, however, the figures were reported into the official corporate financial report. This wasn’t supposed to happen.
That same evening, a birthday party including go-kart racing, an open bar, and free access to one of the city’s most popular nightclubs was planned for the Front Office Manager.
I was invited but I didn’t even make it to the go-kart track. My boss, the regional finance director called me, and told me that the “mistake” (which wasn’t actually a mistake) had to be corrected before midnight. I went back to the office to assist.
Let me explain why the “mistake” wasn’t really a mistake.
The problem was that we didn’t “officially” report the figures. We reported them into a ledger that was kept separate and then, at the end of the year, everything was properly reported. The thought was that since the system was based on forecasts and thus likely to be inaccurate, this was the best way to avoid big swings in the overall financial reports. However smart that might sound, it was also illegal not to report the figures. Not only could it be misleading, but theoretically those of us on the inside could have funnelled off unreported cash without it ever being discovered.
(Needless to say, since I’m not writing this from a mansion on the Côte d’Azur, that didn’t happen.)
Truth be told, all we did with the large surplus from the loyalty programmes was dump it into the black hole of excessive, budget-be-damned, marketing spending. The loyalty programme “broke even” and the marketing overspending was almost acceptable.
I dislike doing illegal things, so on the fateful day of the birthday party I almost attended, I convinced my boss that we had to report the figures. She knew all about accounting laws so she agreed. It shocked the hell out of the people at headquarters who were completely unaware and unprepared for our report to impact their books.
Under threat of being boiled alive in a vat of peanut oil… OK, there was no threat, just an order from the CFO to “fix” the “mistake”… we spent the evening till well past midnight “correcting” it. (The following month, when everyone was prepped and ready, the “mistake” was no longer a mistake and everything was reported correctly. I’ve never been especially patient, but I was pleased that we no longer risked being jailed for running two sets of books…)
The next morning, I flew to Italy with my safety and security hat on. We had opened a new hotel in Milan and another on Lake Garda. I flew over on Saturday, rented a car and drove to the lake property well aware that I was likely doomed and destined to be fired come Monday.
Back then, George Clooney was just becoming famous for his role on “ER”… so there was no celebrity spotting during my stay. Instead, after completing my audit, I spent the evening in the hotel watching a gorgeous Italian sunset from a terrace overlooking the lake while worrying about my future employment.
The hotel was high up on the mountainside above Lake Garda. It was a boring place. I needed some excitement to take my mind off thoughts of being fired and becoming a street person, so I drove down to Peschiera del Garda and caught a train to Venice.
Diving down narrow, winding Italian roads is pretty exciting in itself. I was cautious at first, but once I got the hang of things I opened up the little car and felt like a Formula One driver as I cruised down toward town. Just as I thought I was the reincarnation of Graham Hill, albeit with a full beard instead of a simple mustache, I was passed, on the inside of a hairpin curve, by a Fiat full of elderly nuns.
It was a sunny Spring Sunday in Venice. I wandered around and saw a few sights but my mind remained fixed on what I would do after I was fired. I bought a pizza from a window in a wall and sat on the ground while the warming rays comforted me.
Then a thought struck me. No one knew I was in Venice. No one could contact me.
(This was before cell phones became commonplace… I refused to buy one until the company bought one for me because I knew once I had a cellphone, I would be on call 24/7… I was on call until the morning of the day after I left the company.)
“Maybe I should just stay. Jump off the carousel. Hide out and start over.”
The thought passed and I took the train back to where the rental car was and drove to Milan.
The audit in Milan started on the roof of the hotel and we hadn’t gotten far when someone called from the top of the ladder that led to the roof and said I had to come down to the General Manager’s office.
“The CFO is on the phone from Brussels HQ. He wants to talk to you now!”
I resisted the urge to jump off the roof and end it all. Instead, I donned my “it’s all cool” face and went down to the GM’s office hoping that no one could hear the sound of my pounding heart.
I picked up the phone and immediately started apologizing for the “mistake”. (I did not believe that it was a mistake, but hey, I was trying to keep my job, so don’t @me!)
“What? Oh that. You guys fixed that on Friday night, that’s not why I’m calling.”, the CFO said.
“I just wanted to tell you that we changed your return flight. You’ll be stopping in Copenhagen to meet with the head of IT. The guy that runs the database marketing programme left abruptly so we want you to take that over. It could be good to leverage that for the loyalty programme.”
By the time I got back to Oslo a couple of days later, I had four jobs. Corporate Safety and Security, Loyalty Programme Manager, Travel Agent Commission Payment Coordinator and Database Marketing Manager.
That’s too many words for a business card so my title became, “Special Programmes Coordinator”. Fortunately, no further “special programmes” came my way.
At least I hadn’t been fired, but now I had four jobs.
I didn’t know who he was at the time, but I instinctively followed Richard Branson’s advice: “If someone offers you a good opportunity that you’re not sure you can handle, say yes and figure it out later.”
Or, in my case, if someone offers you more work when you’re expecting to get fired, say yes, get at it, and hope for the best.
Stay safe, Aways Care
Written with the clarity of hindsight, the accuracy of a faded memory, and countless creative liberties, 87 Stories is a journal of how my gap year lasted four decades, made me an emigrant, an immigrant and gave me a life I never dreamed of.
The surreal stories from the hidden world of hotels series gives a behind-the-scenes look at the wacky, wonderful world of hotels from the eyes of a university dropout who had a storied, basement-to-boardroom career in hotel security. Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss any of the episodes!
In addition to my love for writing, I’m also a professor, an educator, and a consultant. I’ve been told that my specialty is saving bacon.
Need a storyteller to motivate your team. You can hire me! Unlike many storytellers for hire, I guarantee that I only tell my own stories…
If you’re looking for a better way to treat your employees this holiday season than getting them so drunk that they might punch you in the face, why not gift them all our book, “Spin the Bottle Service”? Some people say it makes people better guests!
Thanks for being part of the Always Care Community. Your support is my motivation and I’m genuinely grateful that you’re here. Please share, subscribe, and connect with me.
"Have you heard the one about the four nuns in a Fiat? Apparently, there were these four nuns..."