The SOJOURNEUM® raison d’être and research product portfolio

In the previous edition of SOJOURNEUM SCENERIES, we reflected on the philosophical moorings of the concept of hospitality, and the role of “rejuvenation” or “restoration” and “nurture” in its conceptualisation. We emphasised the considerably greater profundity of “restorative nurturance” in comparison to the contemporary concept of “leisure”. Finally, we discussed the adjustments and repurposing needed in hospitality goals, environment, capabilities, processes and infrastructure in order to achieve the goal of “restorative nurturance” (https://nirsanconnect.com/09/05/2019/sojourneum-sceneries/restorative-nurturance-in-hospitality/). In this edition, we bring the construct of “restorative nurturance” for discussion through SOJOURNEUM® – our research category aimed at enabling restoration of guests and customers through nurturance in hospitality organisations. We describe the six research products within the category, and reflect on the synergies from the SOJOURNEUM® platform that go over and beyond the benefits that schools get from individual products.

The SOJOURNEUM® platform contains research products that enables hospitality institutions restore and rejuvenate their guest customers by strengthening four aspects of their environment – distal and proximal restoration goals, the identity of “guests” and “hosts”, the goals of customer service, and core beliefs related to the “way of life in hospitality”. REJUVIRON® conducts research into the environment of hospitality and the organisation’s “way of life”; HOSTELLAR® enables hospitality institutions search for the qualities of good hosts; EMLABOR® assesses the degree and type of emotional labour prevalent in hospitality; OCLIME® tests the limits of the hospitality business’ organisation climate; GUIDEN® enquires into approaches to enhance customer experience; QUALEST® researches to examine service quality in hospitality institutions.

Over five decades of research has undeniably established the restorative qualities of hospitality. It is our belief that hospitality’s central aim should be to enhance overall well-being through its powers of ‘restorative nurturance’. Combined with philosophies from tradition and spirituality, such nurturance provides a picture of ‘way of life in hospitality’ and features of ‘ideal hosts’ and ‘hospitable places’. It is on that basis that REJUVIRON® assesses the hospitality environment proffered by your organisation including its hospitality goals; ‘way of life’ along five belief-oriented dimensions; and its measure vis-à-vis characteristics of ‘hospitable places, gestures and hosts’.

It is indisputable that host’s capabilities will determine the quality of hospitality. HOSTELLAR® provides a diagnostic of how capable the organisation and its employees are in their primary role of ‘hosts’. HOSTELLAR® profiles host’s capabilities for an entire organisation, for departmental units and teams, and for individual employees. On the basis of research over decades, we believe that attitudes and traits in hospitality are distinct from those needed in services in general. ‘Service predisposition’ in hospitality is a unique concept. HOSTELLAR® functions around a four-layered framework custom-designed for hospitality, and includes inner qualities, identity of self, attitudes and agency, and behavioural traits.

Emotional labour is a stark reality in hospitality. While it is the primary coping mechanism for hospitality employees, it is also the main reason behind employee unhappiness, untimely burnout and declining performance. Emotional labour causes emotional dissonance, emotional exhaustion, interpersonal stressors and conflict. The emotional depletion caused by emotional labour affects employee’s ability to attend to her job, leading to burnout. EMLABOR® characterises the level and nature of emotional labour within your organisation, identifies underlying drivers, and outlines its impact on employee burnout, with the ultimate goal of enhancing job satisfaction and employee productivity.

Research has established that organisation climate is the most critical determinant of quality in hospitality, ahead even of the service predisposition of individual service providers. Furthermore, organisation climate has a material influence on service predisposition. Also, importantly, organisation climate enables a stable pattern of social interaction behaviour during service encounters leading to service reliability. OCLIME® provides a rich view of the climate of your organisation along a set of seven dimensions and outlines the impact of this organisational climate on service predispositions of employees, service goals held by your organisation, and quality of customer facing processes.

Guiding the guest’s mind towards positive aspects of her experience is an impactful marketing measure for creating happy customers. Research in cognitive psychology has confirmed that mindfulness while experiencing pleasure and anticipation prior to the event enhance customer’s perception of the overall experience. GUIDEN® builds on this phenomenon to provide a candid picture of how good you are at leveraging positive guest experiences that you generate, and identify interventions linked to psychological signalling, anticipation, imagery creation and self-observation. GUIDEN® is underpinned by the principle that “it is as impactful, if not more, to emphasise pleasant experiences as it is to mitigate unpleasant ones”.

Service quality is a complex concept given the intangibility, inseparability, heterogeneity and perishability of services. It turns further complicated in hospitality given the difficulty in articulating characteristics of ‘good perceived quality’ and the strong influence of ‘emotional labour’ on employee performance. QUALEST® cuts through the complexity and gives you a grip on your institution’s service quality. QUALEST® is a deep versatile product that links quality to customer context and wants; assesses quality of various facets of organisation including service behaviour, problem incidences, and business processes; adopts objective as well as subjective quality measurement; and conducts gap analysis to estimate drivers of lost quality.

Evidently, each of the six products within SOJOURNEUM® enquires for insights while being founded on a unique belief or affirmation that serves as its pedagogic backbone. REJUVIRON® emphasises the “way of life in hospitality” when assessing the hospitality environment, while HOSTELLAR® is predicated on the unique nature of “service predisposition” in hospitality. While EMLABOR® believes in the causal relationship between emotional labour and interpersonal stressors and conflict, OCLIME® leverages the relationship between organisation climate and service predisposition. And meanwhile, as GUIDEN® emphasises the reinforcing impact of mindfulness and anticipation in the experiencing of hospitality, QUALEST® is underpinned by the linkage between service quality and customer context and wants in hospitality. The SOJOURNEUM® platform leads to synergies that lies over and above the impact of individual products by perforce ensuring the conditions of “restorative nurturance” in all research within the platform.

In the next edition of SOJOURNEUM SCENERIES, we start our journey to study individual research products on the platform. We begin by appreciating the restorative qualities of hospitality, comprehending the “way of life in hospitality”, and analysing how REJUVIRON® enquires for restoration of guests in hospitality environments.