A Dubai hotel whose GM is room attendant

Senior management of the Raffles Dubai team rolled up their sleeves and swapped their day jobs to work in the “real” parts of the hotel, adopting the Japanese ‘Gemba’ philosophy for a day last week.

Among them was Peter French, the general manager of the hotel, who became a room attendant and was a dab hand at the hospital corners on the bed sheets!

The director of rooms tried his hand at F&B service, serving lunch in a restaurant, and the director of sales and marketing took on an authoritative figure having spent the day with security, whilst the director of finance worked in the spa and pool, scrubbing the pool deck.

“I believe strongly in teamwork and feel it is important and very good fun to work more closely with the front line colleagues and to be at the coalface of this iconic property. With such a dedicated team I look forward to continuing Gemba day as an annual event,” said a sporting French, the hotel GM.

Gemba is a Japanese term meaning ‘the actual place’ or ‘the real place.’ In business, gemba refers to the place where value is created and where you interact directly with the customer.

Japanese detectives call the crime scene gemba, and Japanese TV reporters may refer to themselves as reporting from gemba. In manufacturing the gemba is the factory floor. It can be any "site" such as a construction site, sales floor or where the service provider interacts directly with the customer.

Management guru Glenn Mazur introduced this term to the wider world, to mean the customer’s place of business or lifestyle. The idea is that to be customer-driven, one must go to the customer’s gemba to understand his problems and opportunities, using all one’s senses to gather and process data.