Human Resource in the Hospitality Industry

 

The hospitality industry is a wide category of fields within the service industry that includes numerous businesses such as hotels, resorts, restaurants, lodge, event planning, theme parks, travel and tourism agencies. All of these industries are connected by their drive to provide an enjoyable experience for all who engage. The atmosphere is welcoming and warm, the facilities mostly offer convenient amenities such as showers or complimentary valet parking, and their revenue typically relies on whether or not people enjoy being there.

Human Resource Management is an essential organizational component that oversees the welfare of the company’s employees. Its function is to help managers plan, recruit, select, train, develop, remunerate, and maintain members for an organization. The Human Resource department of a hotel is taking part in anticipation, acquisition, selection, and development of the present and future employee needs of the hotel. It also includes the processes of job evaluation, recruitment, selection, and orientation.

Fig. 1. Hospitality Management, Hotel Manager, Hospitality Industry

Role of Human Resource in Hotel Industry:

1. Acquire or sharpen capabilities required to perform various functions associated with their present or expected future roles.
2. Develop their general capabilities as individuals and teams, discover and exploit their inner potential for their own and organizational growth and development purposes.
3. Develop an organizational culture in which supervisor-subordinate relationships, teamwork, and collaboration among subunits are strong and contribute to the professional well-being, motivation, and pride of employees.

Challenges in Hospitality Industry that Human Resource Face and Possible Approach:

1.   To ensure that both employees and employers engage in the process so that improvements are consistent with the aspirations and wishes of both groups’ higher margins and productivity for businesses, higher wages, and a better work-life balance for employees.

2.   The long working hours increase stress on individuals and have potentially harmful effects on their psychological and physical health. Social effects might include an increase in family tension and stress in marital relations.

3.   The characteristics features of work in hotels and catering long, anti-social hours, low pay, instability, and low status make it unattractive as a career choice, and as a result, the sector continues to suffer from high staff turnover and difficulties in recruiting qualified staff.

4.   For the organization, it could lead to poor labor productivity both in terms of increased absenteeism and declining marginal productivity of labor when present at the workplace but working long hours.

5.   The hotel staff works especially hard on those days when the rest of the world is enjoying vacations, such as Diwali, Christmas, New year, and long weekends. The hotels are generally booked to capacity during such festival and holiday seasons and the hotel staff is required to work overtime during these periods.

6.   Retaining the best employees ensures customer satisfaction, product sales, effective succession planning, and deeply embedded organizational knowledge and learning. The Human Resource personnel should analyze the results of the exit interviews, come up with remedial solutions, and initiate action.

7.   Having set about improving working conditions, the next challenge is to attract and retain the correct staff. To deal with this, some employers have focused on job satisfaction and designed systems to reward staff for their performance. Key employee retention is critical to the long-term success of any business.

Some of the issues that Human Resource Managers in the Hospitality Sector deal with are related to intercultural management, people empowerment, and people enabling all of which are very important to ensure that the employees of firms in the hospitality sector actualize their duties and provide stellar and superlative customer service. Turning to the specific cultural challenges related to intercultural management and cross-cultural communication that Human Resource Managers have to contend with in the hospitality sector. It is a fact that hotels, airlines, restaurants, tour and travel operators, and the like depend on foreign tourists and travelers from around the world for their existence as profit making entities. Thus, there is a need for their employees to bridge the cultural gaps and cross the chasm between different cultures.

Fig. 2. Tourism and Hospitality Sector

Human Resource Managers ensure that they align the rewards with the performance in a manner that brings out the best in their employees. For instance, paying performance linked bonus and variable pay linked to performance can help the employees better their performance. The pay and benefits. such as transport to drop the employees’ home (especially women and those working in the night shift), weekly offs so that employees get a chance to relax and unwind in addition to job rotation and role rotation so that employees learn new skills and become adept at managing the entire hospitality value chain. Indeed, some of these policies are already being tried out in many international hotels and tour and travel operators where such policies are being implemented based on extensive research into the high-performance attributes of employees in the hospitality sector. Moreover, such policies also ensure that employees do not jump ship frequently or in other words, high attrition which is the hallmark of the sector can be avoided.

Human resource management plays an important role the hotel sector. As a service industry, the satisfaction of staff is vital to the performance of any hospitality business and can drive the growth of the company. Service industries like hospitality and tourism need managers who are skilled in human resources management, as profits within this industry are driven by the people working in them.

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References:

Ruzgar & Ulgen, “HR Management in Hospitality Industry”, 2018

Baum, T. et al.,”Sustainability and the tourism and hospitality workforce: A Thematic Analysis”,2016

Tamara Lytle, “Human Resource Challenges in the Hospitality Industry”, 2020

Le Cordon Bleu, “Why Human Resource Management is the Key in Hospitality Industry".