Supervisory Skills in Tourism and Hospitality Samples for Students

Question: Discuss about the Supervisory Skills In Tourism And Hospitality. Answer: Introduction The hotel industry today faces complex challenges for satisfying increasingly sophisticated global customers. To attract and retain customers these industries should implement technologically advanced yet cost effective strategies and attractive pricing strategies that will give them a competitive advantage. They also need to implement strategies for retaining maximum employees. Operational employees play a vital role in providing good quality service to customers by converting the unsatisfied customers to satisfied and loyal ones (Kusluvan et al. 2010). The high attrition rate of operational employees is the major area of concern for hotel and tourism industry. Managing staff turnover for retaining employees can reduce costs for new recruitment. Professionalism, labor development, and frequent motivation are the keys to success for a hotel. This report deals with the positive and negative HR management strategies of the hotel industry and provides recommendations for improving their business by gaining competitive advantage. Systems Brain need to implement for changing HR Management The problems that Brian faces in human resources management in mainly because he is dependent totally on a third person for looking after this department. He is not involved with any aspect of human resource management for the hotel. The person Mary, who is responsible for management of this area, is herself not good at dealing with customer issues. She got involved in too many altercations with the hotel guests when she worked at the front desk. Hence, the management removed her from that position and promoted her to a human resource practitioner. She is always busy with hiring new employees having no time to train the new joiners. Most of the front desk employees either are quitters or have been fired from previous jobs. These ill-trained employees treat the customers badly and are responsible for the low occupancy rate of the hotel. The customer satisfaction rate is only 6 out of 10. As the HR personnel is always busy, she doesnt have time to pay the wages on time and does not imp lement any policies as a guidance for employees to perform better. This dissatisfaction among employees is the cause of high turnover rate at Harbor View Hotel, which is 120%. The main area that Brian should bring changes is the hiring of new employees. Hiring good talents can totally change the atmosphere and productivity of the hotel by providing quality services to customers (Nadiri Tanova, 2010). Brian should make sure that the human resource personnel to recruit upbeat, dedicated workers for each position. The next look after of Brian should be to cut down the attrition rate of employees. For attaining this, Brian needs to provide good training and incentive programs and make sure to provide the salary on time to retain employees for a longer period. He also needs to implement employee progression and promotion policies to retain employees. He should provide ways by which employees get adequate training for gaining necessary skills to work in the advanced position. This will also reduce the expenses as compared to the hiring of new employees for filling positions, which people leave shortly. Strategies followed by Joe for HR Management The things that Brian can learn from Joe are how to recruit suitable employees, retain them by providing them with opportunities and the ways to satisfy customers. Joe is the General Manager of The Mount Hotel and is directly involved in all human resources management decisions. According to Joe, the front-desk area of any hotel is the most important because it deals with most of the customer interactions. He knows the importance of front-desk as he himself worked in that department for a long time. Hence, he deeply scrutinizes people before hiring them. He also looks after the needs of the employees for increasing retention. He has set up incentive programs for those who perform excellently at the front desk. He has created a work environment that works as a team. He gives ample training and information to employees regarding their duties. All these strategies give work satisfaction to employees and they are not learned to leave this hotel. Hence the attrition rate of this hotel is only 25% and that too when casual employees leave. The well-informed, well-trained and satisfied employees are also the reason for satisfied customers (Hjalager, 2010). The employees never ill-treat their customers and look after their needs. These increases return customers and the occupancy rate of the hotel even in off seasons. The customer satisfaction rate is nine out of 10 in the Mount Hotel. Required training and development programs for Harbor side hotel The employee training programs that need the Harbor side Hotel should for increasing its turnover and occupancy rates are in the areas of customer service, public relations, hospitality, local tourism information and first aid. Excellent customer service and good public relations are very important in tourism and hospitality (Yang, 2010). It is the first point of contact between the guest and the representative of the hotel. It is the first opportunity for any hotel to create a good and long lasting impression to the customer (Chand, 2010). The businesses, which prioritize their customers, will have a steady flow of return customers. Satisfied customers provide a good review of the hotel in online social sites and through word of mouth, which increases the customer base of the hotel. The front desk workers of this hotel treat their customers badly leading to low customer satisfaction. They need huge training on customer service. The hotel authority should give training on the need fo r satisfying customers. The front desk workers need to learn how to behave properly with the customers and how to be energetic and helpful while servicing them. They need to know how to prioritize customers before themselves (Tsai et al. 2010). This can increase the customer satisfaction rate and there will be an increase in return guests and occupancy rates for the hotel. The hotel also needs to train and inform their staff on local tourism. The staff needs to identify, implement and monitor commercial opportunities and additional services to raise revenue. The front desk employee needs to know detailed information of all local tourism spots and should know how to book accommodations and make tour reservations for potential guests (Ryu, Lee Gon Kim, 2012). First aid training is very important for the hospitality industry in order to be prepared for any accidents. The staff should know how to deal with an emergency like who to call for help. This increases the sense of security amo ng the customers as well as the employees. Innovative Human resource initiatives for both the hotels Human resource initiatives that can increase the performance of both the hotels are Selective hiring The company should implement policies for hiring based on traits and organizational fit. The sincere attitude of concern towards customers is more important than the prior experience of work in the hospitality industry (Tang Tang, 2012). This helps to filter those employees who can take on-spot decisions, think autonomously, learn the job quickly and has the mentality to work in a team and adapt to changes. The process to test for the trait and organizational fit is to create real-life on job scenarios and make the candidate to work for half a day in that situation. Changing retention strategies Low pay and long working hours are the two main reasons for high attrition rate in the hotel industry. Flexible work arrangements and investing in the long-term development of employees can reduce this problem (Bratton Gold, 2012). Job sharing and outsourcing can also increase employee retention and get the best-talented group of workers. A method for attracting young talented people and stabilizing them in the hotel is to provide them with special training, apprenticeships, personal developments and academic credits. Competency training and leadership development programs Providing training and career development programs to the newly hired employees encourage employees to build knowledge and situation handling tactics that benefit the organization and increases productivity (Brotherton, 2012). Competency training and career development programs help to gain competitive advantage. Through refining their competencies, employees learn to handle larger and complex situations. Their power of taking decisions based on intuitions also develops. According to HR strategies, implementing internal career development programs can help to achieve this goal. Benefits and incentive plans for employees This is the most important aspect of reducing expenses on hiring new employees (Sigala, Christou Gretzel, 2012). Hotels should treat compensation for employees as an investment and not as an expense. As employee performance relates to customer satisfaction, employers should reward hard working and good performing employees from time to time. HR should implement policies as variable pay and performance-oriented pay structure. They should introduce competency-based models for finding out the more skilled and better-performing employees and rewarding them with higher percentages of variable pay (Nickson, 2013). Service organizations highly benefit from competency based pay systems since employees are encouraged to take initiatives for solving a problem and perform better than their co-workers. In addition to rewarding proving positive feedback social recognition to employees works as a great stimulator for increasing employee performance. Conclusion Globalization has tremendously improved the service industries like hotel and tourism. The advancements in the tourism industry have led to the concept of human resources development and management as the pinpoint issue for providing proper service to customers. Fitting deployment of human resource not only satisfies customers on the local level but customers on the global arena are also satisfied. The preliminary issue of hotel industry nowadays is to identify, recruit, channel and incorporate skilled human resources to improve functional efficiency and productivity. Another key for the success of this rapidly growing industry is to engage third party organizers and agencies which have hundreds of skilled professionals to work for them. References Bratton, J., Gold, J. (2012).Human resource management: theory and practice. Palgrave Macmillan. Brotherton, B. (Ed.). (2012).International Hospitality Industry. Routledge. Chand, M. (2010). The impact of HRM practices on service quality, customer satisfaction and performance in the Indian hotel industry.The International Journal of Human Resource Management,21(4), 551-566. Hjalager, A. M. (2010). A review of innovation research in tourism.Tourism management,31(1), 1-12. Kusluvan, S., Kusluvan, Z., Ilhan, I., Buyruk, L. (2010). The human dimension: A review of human resources management issues in the tourism and hospitality industry.Cornell Hospitality Quarterly,51(2), 171-214. Nadiri, H., Tanova, C. (2010). An investigation of the role of justice in turnover intentions, job satisfaction, and organizational citizenship behavior in hospitality industry.International journal of hospitality management,29(1), 33-41. Nickson, D. (2013).Human resource management for hospitality, tourism and events. Routledge. Ryu, K., Lee, H. R., Gon Kim, W. (2012). The influence of the quality of the physical environment, food, and service on restaurant image, customer perceived value, customer satisfaction, and behavioral intentions.International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management,24(2), 200-223. Sigala, M., Christou, E., Gretzel, U. (Eds.). (2012).Social media in travel, tourism and hospitality: Theory, practice and cases. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. Tang, T. W., Tang, Y. Y. (2012). Promoting service-oriented organizational citizenship behaviors in hotels: The role of high-performance human resource practices and organizational social climates.International Journal of Hospitality Management,31(3), 885-895. Tsai, W. H., Hsu, J. L., Chen, C. H., Lin, W. R., Chen, S. P. (2010). An integrated approach for selecting corporate social responsibility programs and costs evaluation in the international tourist hotel.International Journal of Hospitality Management,29(3), 385-396. Yang, J. T. (2010). Antecedents and consequences of job satisfaction in the hotel industry.International Journal of Hospitality Management,29(4), 609-619