Radisson Hunts for Muscovites Who’ll Say ‘Yes’ : Hospitality: As it prepares to open its luxury hotel in Moscow, the firm’s main challenge is to find and train staff in Western-style service.
The Radisson Hotel people are shipping in the furniture, computers and facsimile machines in preparation for the fall opening of the first American-managed hotel in the Soviet Union.
The Radisson Slavjanskaya, a 430-room enterprise connected to a 165-suite business center, is a challenge like none other for Radisson, a unit of the $6.2-billion (annual revenue) Carlson Companies of Minneapolis.
There’s nothing like it in Moscow, where a modern hospitality industry just doesn’t exist, often to the dismay of American and other foreign business people. Even the concept of service is foreign.
Equipping the operation with American television, communications modems, laser printers, phone lines, video conferencing gear and the like, tough as it will be, isn’t the real challenge. Radisson has done that all over the world.
The main challenge, faced before only by McDonald’s, is to find Soviet workers and motivate them to say “Yes, I can,” a Radisson slogan, when a more traditional Soviet response has been to say “No, I can’t.”
Radisson’s venture is a joint one with Intourist, the well-staffed Soviet foreign tourism ministry, which built the structure. But none of the workers will be hired from it.
“We want young, friendly people--people inclined toward helping others,” said Juergen Bartels, who heads the Carlson Hospitality Group, a $2.2-billion enterprise--including Radisson--within the Carlson Companies.
“We will look for nurses and teachers,” he continues. “We will not be hiring any of the hotel and restaurant people of Moscow.”
The entire operation, says Bartels, a perfectionist who worked his way up through European and North American hotels, rises or falls with the quality of the people. His staff, he said, will choose, train, motivate and rate them.
Bartels and his crew plan to employ 30 full-time foreigners, Americans included, and bring in 20 others temporarily from Radisson operations during the first weeks. Each foreigner will be understudied by one or two Soviets.
