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Case study of Mandarin Oriental Bangkok

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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