interview
Building a Better Park
Ocean Park CEO Tom Mehrmann has been making waves
by involving staff more closely in the park’s strategy.
Human Resources sits down to learn about human capital
at Hong Kong’s native theme park.
by Sebastian Bitticks
I
n 2011, the eighth year as Chief
Executive of Ocean Park, Tom
Mehrmann wrote 850 thank you notes
to his staff. When he first took over as the
top leader in 2002, he made a promise
to thank a member of the staff when
a customer gave a positive comment.
These are not common, as anyone in
services can tell you – people take the
time to complain, but to get a person to
go out of their way to sing a business’
praises, something very good must have
happened. That first year, Mr Mehrmann
reckons he wrote about a dozen notes.
The massive expansion in his personal
project underscores the success Ocean
Park has seen in recent years. For the last
eight consecutive years, Ocean Park has
set records for revenue and attendance.
Going from a conservative, wait-forthe-storm-to-pass approach to dramatic
expansions and considerable investment,
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the park has become a major success.
A life-long veteran of the theme park
business, Mr Mehrmann started in a
front line position at a family-owned
American theme park. His focus on
open management and balancing people
development with business development
sent his career international, first to
Spain, and then here to Hong Kong.
Human Resources spoke to him about the
strategies and techniques that have helped
him succeed at one of the Hong Kong’s
signature attractions.
Ocean Park is not like most businesses.
What makes it special from a human
capital perspective?
Mehrmann: As a fixture of the
community, we’ve had generations that
have worked here. We have husbands
and wives working here; people that
have worked here for 37 years. People’s
children work here. Those mean a lot to
the culture of the company, and how you
redefine the company when you want to
move forward without losing your past.
There’s been a real effort to continue
to build internal channels of development
and growth. We’ve made progress, but
we’re not all the way there yet… This is
a tough one. If my operations director has
an opening for a rides manager, it’d be
easy to say ‘I’m going to go out and find
someone’. But you’re not going to find a
rides manager in this market; especially
before Disney came. [But] maybe there’s
someone in the line-level ranks who’s
prepared. I’ve been saying to the team that
they should look around the whole park.
Don’t limit yourself to the discipline, limit
yourself to the talent. Find the leader; you
can place them anywhere.
We took the word succession planning
out of our vocabulary. [When you name
interview
a successor] you’re telling [everyone
else] that they are not going to be your
successor. ‘None of you have a chance.’
We shouldn’t be focused on a successor
per se, we should be focused on individual
development planning (IDP). We began
rolling IDP plans for those who aspired to
do more, indentifying all the high-fliers.
We wanted everyone in the company to
know they too could be a high-flier, they
too can grow into whatever they want to
be. That the opportunities abound here.
In a recent interview, you said you
try to surround yourself with talent.
What is your philosophy for talent
development?
Mehrmann: The base talents have to
be there in the first place. [People] can’t
be taught to be passionate, you’re either
going to be passionate or not passionate
about what you do. When I’m building
or reinforcing the team… I’m looking
for those innate qualities. They have to
have a sense of humour, they have to be
passionate about what they do, and have
a sense of curiosity. Typically, you’re not
going to find leaders who do things by
rote, and our business is rote memorisation.
Our business is reactive to the moment.
[When I joined,]I found those
qualities in the people that were here.
They just weren’t allowed to express
them because of whatever – business
conditions or whatever it may have been.
It used to be a very top-down company.
I had the same thing in Spain; everyone
was waiting for me to say what we were
going to do. I wanted to get in place a
different approach where you [the staff]
tell me what you’d like to do. You see the
situation – what do you think is the best
response? I wanted to get some two-way
dialogue going [to help] set direction, set
strategy, set objectives.
For the last five years, I’ve been
pulling in the assistant executives and we
do an offsite meeting [where] we literally
go through the process of lining up our
next three years. We’re going to have a
follow-up meeting in May.
You’ve been praised for involving
staff in the strategic planning for the
company. How exactly have you done
this, and how would you advocate it to
other organisations?
Mehrmann: It happens in many ways. It
happens by giving them the opportunity
to run events, run assignments. Giving
them the sole responsibility of developing
something. If you could see the media
events we do today compared with
what we did back in ’04, they’re megaproductions today.
Three years ago, I presented the goal
of [having] seven million guests [visit the
park in a year]. At the time we had just hit
five million. We spent three days going
through a programme talking about it.
We asked everyone to draw a picture – if
we’re doing seven million people in five
years, what would the park look like if we
achieved this? We had pictures drawn by
80 different managers. Some were chaos,
some were beautiful harmonies, some were
poetic, some were a mass of things. The
fact is, though, that in asking them to draw
the picture, we opened the dialogue. And
then the dialogue became pervasive. The
dialogue was happening in every corner
of the company. It became the underlining
tone of everything in the company.
When I first got here, I wanted to
know what our engagement was. The
team suggested we do an employee
satisfaction survey, but I shared with them
being happy is ok – I don’t mind knowing
if the staff are satisfied, but being satisfied
and being engaged are two different
things. It was somewhat new thinking at
the time in Hong Kong. I wanted to know
how engaged our employees were so
that whatever limited resources HR had
could be allocated to the right spots. We
couldn’t do a ‘shot-gun’ approach with a
little bit of everything. We needed to be
focused and productive.
I wanted to look at the drivers of
engagement and take action on those.
Of the top ten, pay was either number
eight or nine; it wasn’t number one. Pay
is important and I think you can never
discount it or remove it, but what showed
up at the top was a career path. People
wanted to know they could grow with the
company.
How did Ocean Park make that
employee commitment?
Mehrmann: We built a competency
model based on the engagement survey
– from the employees themselves,
this wasn’t top-down. It was the
employees defining what they saw as
the competencies to be an employee
here. On top of that we came up with
eight competencies for leaders. Those
competencies then became a driver for
our training programme. The team was
able to focus on building a curriculum
that focuses on these competencies
and has become the framework that
has set everything in our training and
development programmes for the last six
years. And it’s been huge in continuing to
build upon engagement.
When there’s a downturn, lots of
company say ‘cut training’. [This is]
because save money immediately, and you
won’t feel the effects of it until three, four,
five years down the road. You save some
money, but what’s the ultimate cost? One
of the commitments we made earlier was,
whether we had a bad year or not was to
not change our training programmes.
No matter how bad the economy is,
we won’t feed [the animals Ocean Park’s
zoo attractions] less; we won’t take
care of them any less. The point is: you
shouldn’t take care of your employees
any less, no matter how bad the times are.
Whatever commitments we make, we
have to fulfil them. That’s who we are.
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