The Significance of Human Resources in the Hospitality Industry
Discuss About The Human Resource Planning Hospitality Sector.
Human resource management is the key element contributing in the success of an organization. HRM practices different activities in order to help operational and functional departments of the organization to achieve their goals by providing efficient and skilled employees to them. When hospitality industry is concerned these practices have more importance as in this industry, employees play more significant role than the other industries. This industry depends more on the employees and also faces several critical challenges regarding human resourcing. Most critical challenges for HRM practices in this industry are the attraction and retention of the employees. The discussion below thoroughly describes these two most critical challenges of HRM practices in the industry and also describes briefly the important factors and their influences as well, which affect these challenges. The analysis of these factors and influences may help HR management for strategic planning for the evaluation and improvement of such specific activities. A strategic approach for these aspects of HRM in hospitality industry is much needed as per the requirement of industry. Industry also needs to recruit skilled and educated employees for the better understanding of their responsibilities to achieve their goals along with the organization’s success.
Hospitality industry depends on the human resources more unlike other industries. Human resources play key role in the success of any organization in hospitality industry. This makes it more important to maintain retain the skilled and educated employees for as long as possible. This makes the discussion even more important to understand the basic essentiality of employee retention to form effective strategies for the employee retention purpose. One particular industry to explore the importance of human resource attraction and retention is tourism and hospitality. The World Tourism Organization states that the total receipts of international tourism in the year 2003 were around 6% of the total worldwide exports of goods and services. In this industry the success and prosper of an organization cannot be achieved without the contribution and support of its employees. Identifying and recruiting the right candidates for the job are two initial steps of HRM activities, but for the development of an organization it is more important to maintain or retain the employees. In many studies it is defined that that one of the main motive of development of tourism and hospitality industry in any economy is provision of the employment to the people of that economy.
Challenges Faced by HR Management in Hospitality Industry
Human resource practices in the hospitality industry face many challenges like employee attraction for the job and retention of the employees as long as possible. Attraction of the employees is very challenging for the HRM executives as they are operating the tertiary sector of the economy where service is provided to the customers instead of the end products. This report consists of the thorough discussion about the challenges faced by the HR management in process of attracting the employees as well as retaining them for a time period in the organization.
Human resource planning is the key element of the organization’s strategy planning. A strategic HR planning helps the organization in achieving its goals successfully. Organizations complete their financial plans routinely to achieve the organizational goals, however, they does not consider the workforce management plans most of the time. But, integrating the human resource management with the other strategic plans associated with the business help the organization to achieve its improvement goals as the employee need meet in this manner (Esenyel & Mahafzah, 2016). Therefore, according to the researches which have done in previous human resource management can be defined as the management and control of the human resources. The department of human resource management is responsible for all the activities related to human resources starting from recruiting to the retention of employees. The human resource management of an organization integrates the performance improvement and the strategic planning of the organization (Saad S. K., 2013).
A number of constraints and problems in tourism industry have concern with the development of human resource. It is found that majority of the employees working in hospitality sector agree with the fact that an effective management of human resource should be considered as a major influencing factor for the enhancement of efficiency and to increase the productivity of the organization (Khan, 2008). Although most of the tourism and hospitality organizations are concern to provide a high quality of service to their customers, maximum staff of their organizations consists of the low or semi-skilled employees. Apart from the planning for recruitment of high skilled and educated employees, managers in the industry are able to recruit relatively low skilled employees just for temporary requirement and face some alarming problems like low productivity of the organizations and low efficiency of the employees (Saad S. K., 2013).
In this industry the nature of the practices of their relevant service production are inextricably associated with the involvement of the customers and some behavioural norms are to be established for the customer satisfaction, expectations and exceeding their expectations. Researches defined that the ethical practice of the services in hotel business is very critical, specifically in the HRM practices. Employees’ view of ethical climate of their organization is completely depends on their job satisfaction, organizational performance, and the commitment of the organization (Pettijohn, Petttijohn, & Taylor, 2008). Ethical problems of the industry mainly reflect the key challenges which occur in the specific case based industry. Ethical violation is not a new term for the industry as 44% workers in restaurant industry had reported that they had stolen case or other merchandise from their workplace. Another recent study states that in the year of 2008, one out of the 30 employees working in the retail restaurant and food-sector has been caught while stealing from the respective employer.
Ethical Issues in HRM Practices
In this industry, as per the common laws, an employer is responsible for the reasonable care of the safety of its employees. The breach of an employer’s duty is considered as a form of omission. Therefore, in the situations where an employer would see the possibility of harm or any other injury to its employees, and fails to take the essential steps in order to avoid such harm or injuries, employer will be considered in the breach of his common duty to take care of employee safety. In this way employee can also sue the employer for the breach of his contract in terms of the common law. Moreover, an employee can also claim for the safe working environment, on the employer’s common law duty.
In hospitality industry success depends on the efficient contribution of its employees for their respective organization. In this order organizations want skilled, educated and professional employees for their business (Barlett, Johnson, & Schneider, 2016). Researches states that employees attract more towards the job satisfaction in many terms like job profile, working hours, salary paid for the job, workplace environment, development opportunities, and compensation. In this way HR management needs a strategic management to attract the employees. This strategic management ensures the main objective of job satisfaction to the employees (Gannon, Doherty, & Roper, 2012).
Performance management is a comprehensive process undertaken by the organization around the world in order to improve their employees’ performance efficiently. In hospitality industry performance management can be compared to the financial management of the organization because as the financial management is important for an organization performance management in this industry is equally important. Since measure of the management is much needed, in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the performance management five different factors are identified namely, (1) nature of performance appraisal, (2) how it is implemented, (3) effectiveness of the communication within the system, (4) how the data is used for the appraisal of performance, and (5) employee’s perception for the system (Ratnawat & Jha, 2013).
Performance management of the organization is practiced by HRM. HRM is the responsible body of an organization for developing talent and people required by the operational and functional departments of the organization. HRM helps the departmental achievements by recruiting desired skilled employees within the company or organization and also provides them with appropriate tools to develop and train them for the maximum efficiency (Chand, 2010). In Hospitality industry employees being the key element of the organization’s success they are required to give their maximum efficient work. In this way to get the maximum efficient work, implementation of employee motivation strategies increases the employee performance significantly (Wlodarczyk, 2011). This statement is justified by the researches showing that motivated employees perform better than the employees not motivated (Lussier, 2011). In this order to attract and retain the employees HR management practices some employee performance appraisal activities. In such activity practices management manages some training and development sessions for their employees to enhance employee’s efficiency. These programmes make employees feel like working in a better environment to work in and ultimately influence their psychology to stay in the same organization for a longer time (Kramar, et al., 2014).
Performance Management in the Hospitality Industry
Every person has his or her own unique set of desires like, beliefs, expectations, values, attitudes, personality, experience, and intellectual qualities. This makes the task of employee motivation much challenging for Human Resource Management. Some of the employees have a very strong desire to work hard and wants to increase their responsibilities while others are inactive and have a lack of aspiration. Some of the factors which influence employee motivation are such as, income, working environment, and job description other factors which influence the employee motivation in a negative aspect is work burden. Recent Researches found that pay for individual performance (PFIP) is associated with a higher level of competence and intrinsic interest (Fang & Gerhart, 2012).
It is suggested by the Equity theory that managers in Hospitality industry should recognize multiple simultaneous needs of an employee, in other words it can be quoted that focusing on one need at a time will not be considered as an effective employee motivation as it will not affect the employee’s motivation psychology (Grifffin & Moorhead, 2011).
In the hospitality and tourism industry, staff retention is the most critical factor as the industry is labour intensive. Employee retention is more like encouraging the employees to remain in the organization as long as possible or a maximum time period. Employee retention is defined as “a strategic technique opted by the organizations or management in order to maintain an effective human resource with achieving the organizational goals at the same time. Another definition of employee retention states that “it is a systematic effort to create and maintain an environment which encourages employees to stay in the organization for a maximum time period (Al-Refaie, 2015). Retention of the employees is a systematic effort of the employers in order to create and maintain a foster environment which encourages the existing employees to be employed in the same organization as long as possible. Employee turnover the concern of whole hospitality industry in the global scenario, and is an obstinate problem that results in the high expenditure for the organizations. There are many factors which encourage the employees to switch for the other organization.
Profession development of the employees is one of the major factors encouraging employee retention. Professional as well as the personal growth of employees is a determining factor for the employee retention. Researchers suggest that employees work longer for the organizations which provide better opportunities for their professional and personal development. Effective promotion influences retention of the employees positively (Danniels, VanLeit, Skipper, Sanders, & Rhyne, 2007).
The relation between pay and retention of employees has been the subject of interest for many researches. Some of the studies suggest that the satisfaction of employees with their earnings is strongly related with their positive decision of staying in the organization for a long time whereas some suggest that there is not a direct relation of pay with the employee’s decision to remain in the organization. Research suggests that although compensation is not one of the major factors which influence a non-management turnover but it can act like a critical factor to increase commitment and reducing the managerial turnover (Moncarz, Zhao, & Kay, 2009).
A balanced work-life is equally important for the engagement of employees and affects the retention in a positive way for the organization. A complete balance between professional and personal life is associated with the sacrifices that the individuals are ready to make the expenses of other aspects of the life. It is observed that giving the holder a possibility to fulfil his/her personal or family responsibilities always increases the employee retention (Loan-Clarke, Arnold, Coombs, Hartley, & Bosley, 2010).
In the modern era businesses always keep their employees informed with almost all the important business affairs and also involve them decision making process of these affairs (Kramar, et al., 2014). Main motive of doing so is to explore the talent of their employees but researchers state that employee’s involvement in such activities of decision making develops a psychological sense of owning the work for employees which results in creating a favourable working environment and also contributes in building a better employee-employer relation (Kramar, et al., 2014).
Nature of the HRM practices has created the necessity of evaluation and improvement of HRM. HRM development of the past few decades influenced by many changes in the practices and view of the management itself such as, workforce flexibility and productivity improvement, organizational changes, HRM strategy elaboration, improvement in partnership role of employees (Bratton & Gold, 2017). Several other surveys and studies also determined the necessity of the evaluation and improvement of HRM. Studies in 2006 indicated that the transforming HRM into a strategic part of the organization is one of the future challenges. Later in 2008, researchers stated that today many executive have created a dashboard dialog on their computers which provides a quick picture of their company’s performance matrices of finance and business. Then it was suggested to highlight the qualitative and quantitative matrices of the company performance (Pieseniece & Volkova, 2010).
The above discussion develops an understanding about various practices of HRM and specially the challenges of HRM in hospitality industry. Discussion concludes that the importance of HRM practices increases significantly when it comes to the hospitality industry. In hospitality industry its importance increases due to the significance of employee importance in the industry. The management has to face so many challenges related to the employee attraction and retention in the industry. HRM executives have to make extra efforts in comparison to other industries to attract and retain their employees for a long time period. In this context this discussion was much needed to understand the importance and significance of strategic HRM practices in hospitality industry. This discussion made it easy to understand the various aspects and factors that influence the effectiveness of employee retention in different ways.
References
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