Page 26 - DMGT106_MANAGING_HUMAN_ELEMENTS_AT_WORK

Managing Human Element at Work

Notes

HRM Case Study and Suggested Solutions

Beachside Hotel Human Capital Dilemma
his is a case of two competing hotels, Sunrise Hotel and Beachside Hotel that are
both located in a medium sized, tourism based town in the Northeast U.S. The
Thotels are both competing for the same set of guests, as well as the same set of
potential employees. They are budget hotels, right next door to each other, with 60 guest
rooms each and a view of the beach. The occupancy during peak season for the Sunrise
Hotel is 98%, but during the winter months goes down to 65%. The Beachside Hotel has
peak season occupancy of 90% and off peak occupancy of 50%. Joe is the General Manager
of Sunrise Hotel and has been in his current position for 5 years. He has been with
Sunrise Hotel for a total of 10 years. He worked his way up at Sunrise Hotel from front
desk agent to front desk supervisor, and finally to Assistant General Manager before he
became the General Manager. He does a good job of screening potential employees for
his front desk area of the hotel because he realizes the importance of that area of the
hotel, especially in tourist areas. He also has incentives set up for excellent performance
of the front desk agents and training and development programs designed to give
everyone information that will help them do their job better. There is a sense of
teamwork at Sunrise Hotel and that helps everyone want to do a good job. His guest
satisfaction ratings for his hotel are overall excellent. On a rating scale of 1–10, his hotel
averages a 9. The average length of tenure of his employees is 4 years, and his current
front desk supervisor was promoted from within, along with his Assistant General
Manager. Because of the small size of the hotel, Joe is actually involved with all of the
hiring decisions and helps to give training programs himself, along with his leadership
team. The employee turnover at the Sunrise Hotel is 25% overall and that is primarily
when hourly employees graduate high school or college and leave the Sunrise Hotel for
a career somewhere else. Brian is the General Manager of the Beachside Hotel and deals
with a very different situation. Brian was brought in from another hotel in the same hotel
group about 6 months ago. He was told by his boss that he needed to “fix” this hotel
so that it would start having better customer satisfaction ratings and more return guests.
Despite the fairly high occupancy noted during peak seasons, the off peak season occupancy
is only 50%. Also noted by his boss, the occupancy should be as good as the Sunrise
Hotel. Brian has been with his hotel group now for 2 years and he came out of the
accounting and finance department in his old hotel. He has a great understanding of the
numbers in the lodging industry, but has not been involved with the human resource
aspects of the job. The turnover of hourly employees at Beachside Hotel is 120% and that
means that Brian is constantly running the hotel shorthanded and with new employees.
The Beachside Hotel has been doing the hiring through a human resource practitioner
in the hotel that was put in the position because she really could not handle serving
guests at the front desk very well. Mary was promoted to human resources a year ago
after she had one too many altercations with the guests at the front desk. The owner of
the hotel wanted to make sure that she would not make any of the other guests angry,
so he promoted her to a human resources practitioner. Since that time, she has been busy
trying to keep up with hiring and she has had no time for training employees. Because
she is so busy, paychecks often come out to employees late, there are no policies written
down for employees to use as a guide for performance, customers are treated badly by
new and poorly trained employees, and the departments of the hotel do not communicate
very effectively and therefore everyone blames everyone else when things go wrong.

Contd...

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