Line-Up in Room Service
From: M. D. Anderson Department of Performance Improvement
Date; January 15, 2008

Narrator: You know, I've always been intrigued by the concept of line-up as far as adding service to an organization and what better to learn about line-up than to speak with someone who used to work at the Ritz-Carlton where line-up was a usual thing. Mohammad is with me. He is the manager of room service and Mohammad let me ask you a question how did you learn about line-up itself.

Mohammad: I used to work at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel before I started to work in here at MD Anderson. I worked there for 12 years and for the last 5 years we always used line-up during the shift where we meet for 10 to 15 minutes just to discuss the daily business, we talk about the occupancy, how busy we are going to be that day, who are the VIPs that come into the hotel, who are some of the customers that we are expecting with special needs or demands, and do we, can we meet those needs and what are we doing to get the customer what they want, we get from corporate a weekly standard, service standard that we discuss where we also get a quote of the day just to make the line-up fun.

Narrator: Excellent.

Mohammad: You know, and that just tell you that those line-up...

Narrator: Are so important.

Mohammad: Exactly.

Narrator:And would you recommend that it is important that all areas, you know, sort of re-calibrate for what is going to be happening.

Mohammad: Well, yeah, I definitely will ask all the managers to think about it and I know MD Anderson start the hurdle team, which is similar to line-up, but I definitely will recommend all the managers to take a minute too during their busy time and just discuss any issues that they need and that is important for the employees to know and learn about.

Narrator:Okay, and about how long is a line-up and then what are the typical steps of a line-up that you all do?

Mohammad: Well, line-up is usually when I keep it short because again you really are busy and you don't have a lot of time, so you want to keep it between 10 to 15 minutes.

Narrator: Okay.

Mohammad: You wan to do it daily, again you don't have, it is not always the manager that needs to conduct the line-up, employees too can get the document or information they need and they can communicate themselves to their coworkers.

Narrator: How are line-ups benefiting the team here, the room service team staff itself.

Mohammad: Well, when I came into MD Anderson, we had to do a line-up and the reason why, I mean we have two shifts, one at 6 o'clock in morning and the other one starts at 3 o'clock in the evening and we have 17 floors to cover, we have about 40 employees between 38 to 40 employees that start every shift and also some of those floors that we cover a couple of them are not in this building they are across the street so and during line-up we assign floors to employees so the employees they know what floor they are working at. We check attendance, make sure all the employees showed up, and if not, then we ask or we discuss how we are going to cover, do the coverage, we talked about special patients with special needs, we distribute work papers to employees, for example, we have a list that we print that has all the patient name and their diet order and they need that to make sure they have the right menu and which patient is on what diet. We talk about business, you know, how busy are we, what are some of the issues that we need to communicate between the a.m. shift to the p.m. shift or vice versa, sometimes employees they have, they just need to ask a question and you are right there, all the managers are present during line-up or they might have, they might want to address the question to their coworkers so it is a good time that you have the whole team in one place and communication becomes very, very easy and very accessible. Our staff, they don't have computers so we cannot E-mail each other and after line-up we hit the floor and like I said earlier you go to 17 floors well try to find someone becomes harder. Also, during line-up, we talk about issues, concerns, we give employees a chance to ask questions, we talk about best practices, you know, somebody thought of an idea how to improve some process so we discuss it with all the team, we see how everyone feels about it, how we are going to pilot the idea, how we are going to study it, how we are going to implement it, we do follow up on projects, and we give employees time to ask questions if something is not clear. Once in a while, we have new employees that still have training issues, and also during line-up, we discuss institutional or department policies, news, sometimes like at the end of the quarter we do our employee recognition and we do it during line-up and the employees they really appreciate that.

Narrator: Good deal, good, well it sounds like line-up is a good way to start off every day and it sure is a culture builder here at room service.

Mohammad: I definitely agree and the staff when they go to their assigned area, they know what they are doing, they know what is expected from them so, you know, again you are giving them a chance to ask and make sure they know where they are going and what's their assignment for the day is.

Narrator: Well, okay. Well listen I want to thank you for sharing with our viewers and we are going to turn them back to the studio.