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Culture of Collaboration
A firsthand account of how the Monterey Bay Aquarium created its Guest Experience Division
by David Rosenberg
HOW DO ZOOS AND AQUARIUMS COMBINE EDUCATION, MISSION, AND ENTERTAINMENT WITH A GREAT GUEST EXPERIENCE? It is truly a marriage of many departments and staff collaborating with one goal in mind—to exceed every guest’s expectation. Historically, organizations have focused on either education and mission or entertainment and fun. The Monterey Bay Aquarium in California stretched the limits in 2007 and developed the perfect recipe to blend these areas in its new Guest Experience Division. That was the first step in creating a new culture of collaboration. To develop a successful Guest Experience Division, three key goals were established:
- Form a collaborative team.
- Develop a comprehensive training program with defined curriculums.
- Wow our guests.
An imperative first step was to break down cultural and organizational barriers and move departments out of individual silos and into a combined collaborative team with the same goals. To jump-start the culture of collaboration at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, we invoked the following actions:
- Physically relocated and redesigned the work zone for the Guest Experience Team. This improved communication among team members since all members shared the same work space.
- Combined the organization to include many areas directly related to guest experience and redefined roles to allow departmental crossover.
- Enhanced and streamlined communications. This included the use of tools such as a weekly division newsletter circulated to all aquarium employees and volunteers, daily information sessions for Guest Experience staff, and regularly scheduled cross-department meetings.
- Created employee forums to share and seek information about vision and culture.
All of this has resulted in an undying focus on our clients—the guests.
We also discovered “the three T’s” are key to collaborative success: training, training, and more training. Once we introduced formal and consistent training, employees from different areas of the aquarium developed a common understanding and knowledge about themselves, one another, and, most important, our guests’ experiences. At the Monterey Bay Aquarium, our Interpretive Training Department became the Guest Experience Training Department, and is charged with ensuring every frontline staff member and volunteer has equal customer service skills and interpretive knowledge of the exhibits to make them experts in their roles. The team creates direction that includes foundation training, daily trainings, enrichment development, and long-term training goals.
Close collaboration with our audience research department helps us apply multiple ways of measuring success. More than just a report card, they are a vehicle that allows members of the division to understand their impact on the guests and the mission. Most organizations have some tools in place to measure guest responses; however, many are not effective in communicating the results. We have found as employees become part of a large collaboration, they are more concerned about how guests perceive their work than how well their department is perceived. It is interesting that staff perception has become one of the key measurement tools we use to improve guest relations. When something great happens, the teams talk about how they can make that experience occur again the next day. If something goes wrong, everyone collaborates on how to fix it. On all levels, the guest feedback drives the team dynamics and makes every day a stepping-stone to a better product.
After only two years, the new Guest Experience Division at the Monterey Bay Aquarium has exceeded both staff’s and guests’ expectations. The group that now prides itself on collaboration is working every day toward making the guest experience even better. The aquarium now enjoys some of the highest audience research marks since it began recording scores in 1996. Much of this success is attributed to the new Guest Experience Division. We have identified efficiencies and synergies that nobody ever dreamed existed. The marriage of education and fun is being achieved at new levels, and the guest experience is continuing to grow daily as the group’s collaboration continues to blossom.
 David Rosenberg was appointed the director of guest experience at the Monterey Bay Aquarium two years ago, shortly after the new division was formed. He started his career at Walt Disney World and subsequently was an executive in a large hotel company for many years.
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