Identify the problem
Historically the hospitality industry did not have the best of
HR practices, so retaining the good employees was a challenge (Lucas, 2002). Many
employees usually have some complaints about employers.
The high turnover rate among employees due to low compensations,
inadequate benefits, and poor working conditions. Low retention and high
turnover rate are not good for the company, as finding good employees is
difficult and training and transition costs money.
Diagnose the cause(s)
Hospitality sector witnesses’ high number of employee
turnover. The employee retention rate is low mainly because the HR policy is
very weak in this service sector. Employees do not have much job satisfaction;
hence they do not have a big reason to stick around in the same organization.
The high employee attrition rate is bad for any company, as
recruiting new talent and training them involves time and money. It should be a
priority to retain good employees.
In order to retain good talent, HR needs to develop a good
policy to incentivize the employees with good compensation, benefits, and
provide a better working condition. Which were missing? The manages never
acknowledged or appreciated the employees. As a result, the employees never had
any motivation.
Prescribe possible alternatives
To retain a good employee’s hospitality industry needs to set
up a performance-based incentive plan and offer benefits. There can be many
ways to evaluate performance. One possible way can be taking direct feedback
from customers.
In the service industry taking direct feedback from the client might
help to gather feedback.
And the company should address the very basic necessities
such as decent pay, which is at par with the market rate, the standard amount of work
per week, such as 40 hrs a week.
Whoever performs well
should be recognized by the manager. Acknowledgment and appreciation are very
important.
Benefits such as
retirement benefits, higher education aide, healthcare benefits will help
retain employees too.
Recommend a plan of action
The management should allocate a budget for employee
benefits.
The HRM should come up with a policy of benefits such as
days off, higher education aide, retirement benefits, and healthcare benefits.
HR should set a policy for gathering client feedback for
employees and based on the feedback received there should performance
evaluation and based on performance there should be an incentive.
During onboarding, the employees should be trained and to
make informed about policies and benefits offered by the organization.
Management can directly take ideas for improvement from
front line employees and reward the most valuable idea. I believe since the
employees work directly with customers, they might have a good idea about what
needs to be changed.
Why this case is important and
relevant to a study of business
The service industry recognizes the importance of retention
of better employees to build a competitive edge but the hospitality industry
has underdeveloped HR practice (Lucas,2002). And good employee retention will
always reward the company, be it in the service sector or any other sector. Since
this case study focuses on the hospitality industry, this will always be relevant
to that industry. In the age of robotics and artificial intelligence one might
think, will front line employees be relevant in the future? Probably we can learn
from the hotel in Japan that had to fire robots and replace those positions
with humans (Liao,2019), that for now, employees are to remain very important.
And another aspect is how to motivate employees, this
case study gives us information on that too. While employees are demotivated
due to low compensation, inadequate benefits, poor working conditions
and compromised employee morale and attitudes (Maroudas et al., 2008). But
there is no cookie-cutter approach to motivate employees. Employees from
different departments respond in different ways to job rewards (Simons and Enz,
1995).
References
Lucas, R. (2002). Fragments of HRM in hospitality? Evidence
from the 1998 workplace employee relation survey. International Journal of
Contemporary Hospitality Management, 14(5), 207-212.
Simons, T. & Enz, C.A. (1995). Motivating hotel employees.
Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly, 36(1), 20-27
Maroudas, L., Kyriakidou, O., & Vacharis, A. (2008).
Employees’ motivation in the luxury hotel industry: The perceived effectiveness
of human-resources practices. Managing Leisure, 13, 258-271.
Liao, S (January, 2019). Japan’s robot hotel lays off half the
robots after they created more work for humans. Retrieved from https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/15/18184198/japans-robot-hotel-lay-off-work-for-humans
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