Success Story

A youthful, interactive tool for communication and knowledge management

In 25hours Hotels, hotelkit’s operations and communications software is known as TIM (twenty five hours information management). It is so popular with employees that it even received birthday congratulations on its first anniversary with the group.

Challenges

25hours Hotels has twelve hotels in eight cities. Nothing is off-the-peg here: each hotel is tailored to its location, offering sometimes cool, sometimes colourful, sometimes nostalgic, and sometimes glamorous surroundings. No wonder that guests with a desire for something special
feel at home here, true to the 25hours Hotels motto: “Real place, real people.”

Their challenges arose from exactly this situation. Every single hotel charms its guests through its personality and individuality. At the same time, concise procedures needed to be largely standardised in order to make the 25hours feeling noticeable in every hotel. Essential basics and knowledge have to be developed by the Head Office and made available to all the businesses. So they were looking for one simple central platform to deal with inter-hotel communication.

Or, to put it in the words of Managing Director Michael End: “We are a youthful hotel group with dynamic employees. They’re used to contributing, networking and mobile working. So we were looking for an internal communication tool which would enable us to be flexible, and help us to propel ideas and innovations across depart ments and between hotels.”

Implementation

Youthful & dynamic – that’s what we are, and so is hotelkit! It couldn’t suit us better.

Michael End Managing Director

From the very first moment, the test phase was extremely well structured, because the clients not only knew what functions they required, but also how they should use them. The technical set-up took place in February 2014, and from then on hotelkit was known by the name TIM. In order to ensure employee acceptance from the outset, 25hours Hotels developed their own logo for TIM, and provided “him” with a little mascot.

25hours Hotels are also unique, because they implemented TIM at all their hotels at the same time. Initially this meant a major organisational effort, but the 25hours team’s excellent preparation led to a smooth, if intensive start. It also helped that each hotel had a designated person responsible for implementing TIM on the ground.

The main focus during the test phase was communication, both internally and between the hotels. They set themselves the medium-term goal of creating a complete knowledge management system within TIM, accessible to all hotels at any time.

Results

For 25hours Hotels, it is just as important that the communication and knowledge tool looks attractive and youthful as well as functions intuitively for all employees. TIM has risen to this challenge magnificently. In just one year, “he” collected 700 handbook articles in the knowledge area; since then, the number has grown to around 2,900. It contains instruction manuals and processes for each of the hotels, company standards, and even pictorial instructions of work processes in the various departments, complete with photos and videos. Not only does this create links between existing members of the team, it also facilitates the training of new employees. This is why 25hours Hotels doesn’t offer an induction pack in the classic sense. Instead, new employees are simply shown the ropes by TIM, including a digital introduction to their future colleagues – the perfect way to settle in quickly and begin working independently.

Every colleague can get information and contribute. TIM is an integral part of many of our daily internal processes.

Maren Woldag Operations Manager

In addition, employees across all the hotels upload their daily notes and management reports, so that all colleagues are always up-to-date. In this way, geographical barriers have almost disappeared – and exchanges between the various sites are highly active.

No wonder, that TIM’s first “birthday” also included affectionate greetings among the posts. TIM is not resting on his laurels, however, as many new hotels have already been added to the line-up, and more are in the pipeline. Thanks to the existing structures, implementation today is much easier, with new colleagues benefiting immediately from existing knowledge.

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