Hotpot hospitality good lesson for city officials

A 28-member team of officials visited a hotpot restaurant in Nanjing city in East China's Jiangsu province on Tuesday not for the delicious Chinese food, but to learn how to serve people better, the xhby.net reported Friday.

The hotpot restaurant, as a branch outlet of the popular Sichuan Haidilao Catering Co Ltd, which has a nationwide reputation for high-quality and hospitable service, is used to visitors who want to expand their experience and management skills, but it was its first time to receive visitors as special as this official team from Yangzhou city of Jiangsu province, headed by Wu Xiao'an, the head of urban management for Yangzhou city.

The visit to the restaurant was inspired by a case study of employee management at Haidilao published in a Chinese edition of the Harvard Business Review in 2009. The secretary of the CPC Yangzhou municipal committee, Wang Yanwen, forwarded the case study to Wu on July 26 and suggested he attempt a similar learning experience at Haidilao.

The officials spent four hours in the Haidialao outlet and were impressed with the restaurant's treatment of its employees, noting they treated them like the family members by renting housing for them, hiring nannies and providing four free meals each day, among other things.

Such good treatment motivated the employees to serve the customers with sincere smiles and hospitalities, which came from the bottom of their hearts.

"It is hard to learn the heart-to-heart way they serve, but we have to learn," said Wu.

The experience prompted an urban management officers' self-rethinking of urban management, Wu added. While the learning visit also reminded another urban management official that many conflicts could have be avoided if local enforcement staff could think about the street vendors in the same way the Haidilao employees do to their customers.

Wu also invited Haidilao's founder to Yangzhou to have a discussion about the management.

In recent years, the urban management officers have been notorious across the country for their cruel and violent enforcement of rules relating to street vendors.