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Managing Human Resources

Hospitality sector is a wide category of fields which falls under the purview of the service industry and includes accommodation, F&B, Catering, Events & Meeting, Spa & Wellness, Casino, Travel and tourism and many more. The primary foundation of Hospitality industry is built upon excellent customer service. Due to high intangibility in the service sector, customer service is one of the strongest contributing factors in the profits and success of the hospitality sector. It is due to such high dependency and responsibility on the employees, it becomes challenging to attract and retain the employees in the hospitality sector. However, employees working in the hospitality sector have the opportunity to move up the ladder in a short span of time and move swiftly towards the management roles. Drawing on the introduction to the hospitality sector, the primary purpose of essay here is to identify the key challenges in attracting and retaining workforce in the hospitality sector.

This section of Essay will lay the base on the importance of the hospitality sector for the economy, implying strong career growth opportunities in number of department such as front desk, hotels, cabin crew, and mainstream roles such as sales, marketing and finance. Hospitality is the fastest growing global industry which adds new job every 2.3 seconds. The industry is growing at 4.2% per year, it is much higher than the overall growth rate of the global economy. It employees over 300 million people worldwide and account for over 12% of the global jobs. The future of the hospitality sector is extremely promising which reflects plethora of opportunities for the potential employees, thus embarking the importance of the sector (Willie et. al., 2017).

Hospitality sector is under a lot of pressure when it comes to attracting, developing and retaining the employees, the sector has seen huge turnover in the past which significantly impacts the brand value of the company and the entire sector in general. Employees are the heart and soul of the hospitality sector, this it becomes extremely important to identify the challenges in attracting them and then working towards the strategy to retain them by creating an ecosystem of win-win for both the employee and the employer (Murray et. al., 2017).

One of the biggest challenges while attracting talent for the hospitality sector is the perception of the potential employees and their outlook towards the industry. A large majority of population feels, that jobs in hospitality sector are not secure and consistently under the purview of changing economic conditions. The sector is highly characterized as the provider of low stability jobs which refrains the employees from joining the sector. Moreover, the sector is also characterized as the provider of lowest wage, primarily working in the hotels and restaurant. In one of the recent studies it was pointed that hospitality sector is the economic activity with the highest proportion of low wage earners (Bradley et. al., 2017)

This perception of the potential employees towards the hospitality sector has to be changed, otherwise the sector will show further turnover and in no time the demand for the employees will reach an all-time high, which would create a bigger supply demand mismatch.  Job satisfaction and job stability has to be assured to the employees, only then will they spread a positive word of mouth and get their peers to come and work in the hospitality sector. Certain changes in setting up the wage policy to uplift the job at lower level will further help in giving an impetus while attracting employees in one of the most challenging sector (Brien, Thomas & Brown, 2017).

Another major challenge which comes in the way of recruiting and attracting talent in the hospitality sector is the hierarchical structure of the organization. Authoritarian style of leadership is pervasive in the hospitality sector, particularly the Hotel and Airlines; this leaves very little room for employees to voice their opinion. Employees do not feel empowered as they are not being engaged in decision making, neither are they asked to give feedback on some change; this makes the industry highly unattractive to them. In the present day business context, when the times are changing, employees wants to feel valued working in the organization. They are looking for more and more factors of job satisfaction, while eliminating the hygiene factors from their job. Thus, the leadership and the perception of the management is another major challenge at the hands of hospitality sector which restricts them in attracting and retaining top talent in the sector (Sandy & McCartney, 2015).

Social media has spread like a wildfire in the last decade, of the 7.593 billion populations in the world, there is a penetration of 42% in social media, which roughly accounts to over 3.196 billion people. The statistics mentioned are amusing in the way that hospitality sector fails to leverage the growth in social media to attract and retain talent. Hospitality sector has been using social media to attract, engage and manage the management level employees; they fail to understand that even the entry level employees are present on the huge platform. Social media platform is inexpensive, easy to use and gives lot of opportunities to engage with the potential employees. It becomes easy to consume information on the go; moreover the usage of analytics of social platforms gives valuable information about the potential employees. The HR team can use the information to attract and retain the talent. However, the company fails to use it to target the entry level jobs, which puts them on a back foot in attracting talent (Solnet, Kralj & Baum, 2015).

It has been often spoken in the past that the employees required for the hospitality sector; have to have high knowledge of human emotions, skills to empathize with the customers, excellent soft skills great communication skills, enriching interpersonal skills, well groomed and many more. It really becomes difficult to target an employee who already has all the required skill set for the job. This is next to impossible, because most probably, a person who has all the traits to excel in the hospitality sector would definitely be working someplace else, and would have been getting the required perks to stay in that particular organization. This practice of recruitment in itself possesses a big challenge. It becomes extremely difficult to hire such talent; also the countabilty of such talent readily available in the market is low. The alternate strategy here should be to set basic criteria for selection for the entry and the mid-level employees, keep a buffer or a gap for the training of the selected candidates and turn them into polished employees. Setting up high criteria for selection of employees at the entry and mid-level comes as a big challenge in recruitment and selection. Thus, it becomes important for the HR managers to look for the basic qualities required for the job in a person, and then provides them an environment of learning and development to brush their skills and make them sector ready. This would help them in developing deep trust towards the organization, besides spreading a positive word they would also push their friends to be a part of the growing hospitality sector (Sun, Liu, Law &        Zhong, 2017).

Millennial (18-35 years) is the section of society which is driving the change in the world, and most definitely are the major drivers of the industries worldwide. Millennial not only have the required set of skills for the job, due to their education and skills relevant to hospitality sector. The skills relevant to the hospital involve high human interaction, understanding of human sentiments, willingness to help and travel extra mile for the customers and excellent soft skills. These skills are easily transferable to other sectors for high performing hospitality employees. Thus it can be said that the desirability of the millennial to move and globalization which fosters on boundary less careers are the major challenges in attracting and retaining the employees (Chand, 2016).

The hospitality sector in the present day situation is under a lot of stress due to its inability in attracting and retaining the talent in the sector. One of the other challenges identified is the wrong strategy deployed in recruiting the candidate at organization. It is often seen that in order to fulfil the employed gap in the organization, the recruiters are focussing on the job fit employees rather than the employee who is an organizational fit. It is important to focus on finding the candidate who will be a fit in the organization. The inability to match the skills of the candidates In accordance with that of the organization results in high turnover in the hospitality sector (Grobelna & Marciszewska, 2016).

Employees in the present day are looking for organization which can give them work-life harmony, support and encouragement, rewards and appraisals and lastly an environment where they can demonstrate their skills and consistently work towards picking up new skills to move on an upward trajectory in their careers. These category of people are not interested in knowing the plans of the organization, they are more focussed on themselves, thus requiring a high engagement from their employers. The hospitality sector is unable to engage them and provide them benefits better suited to their professional capabilities, thus the employees leave the industry and switch careers.

As mentioned in the earlier section in the essay, hospitality sector employees people with excellent soft skills, understanding of the service ecosystem, customer excellence and great interpersonal skills. Depending upon the industry to industry, the skills may further differ in terms of the depth of skill. Ordinarily, there are not too many people with the relevant skill sets, which make them difficult to be employable. Thus, the absence of sector ready employees is one of the biggest challenges in attracting and retaining the employees. Alternate strategy for it can be creating a pool of employees and making them industry ready. This initial cost will help the hospitality sector in doing away with its problem of unproductivity, when an employee leaves the job, but would also help in creating additional workforce, ready to work in the hospitality sector.

Once the employees are selected and recruited, the real job of the HR manager commences. The job does not end at just the recruitment and the selection of the employees. Organization has to ensure that they not only nurture and enhance the skill set of the employee, they keep them motivated to push themselves to achieve the goals of the organization, and thus motivation plays a key role here. Every person is different from the other person; this also implies that a strategy of motivation for one does not necessarily means the same for the other. HR in the hospitality sector has to understand this difference and use the need of motivation for a person on an individual basis. Maslow Need theory helps in identifying at which stage of motivation a person stands; accordingly the organization can use the framework to motivate its employees, thus retaining them in the sector, while keeping their productivity high.

Employer branding is a key facet to recruiting the top talent, or even an entry level talent for instance. The brand of the employer is the first thing which comes in the mind of potential employees, thus it becomes important for the organization to focus on their branding to attract the talent in the organization. Employer brand in simple words is the place of reputation for work; it translates and sends out the message which is a reflection of the organization culture. Employer branding to the target segment not only helps in attracting the top talent in the industry, it also boasts the motivation of the existing employees. Hospitality industry has to ensure that it focuses on its branding strategies to hire the talent with excellent customer skills. The branding can easily be done through the popular channels of marketing such as Linked-In and Facebook. These two platforms provide great opportunity for hiring key talent, as well to create groups, community and customized pages to focus the efforts in hiring the organization-fit candidate. The vastness of the social media platform will ensure the message is reached to the target audience, thus helping in attracting a good herd of talent pool(Kramer, 2012)

It is not always the fault of the organization in retaining the talent,  at times, the employees set unrealistic expectation from the organization, which when unable to meet result in huge turnover for the organization. Thus, it is the duty of the organization to ensure they do not overpromise in recruiting a talent, and maintain high transparency(Hopkins, 2012). Also, efforts should be made to address the expectation of the employees in a rationale and logical way and keep the expectation in the purview of the organization. This will help in retaining the employees who because of their unrealistic expectation look for a job change (Gibbs, McDonald & MacKay, 2015).

Work environment is necessary when it comes to evaluating the reasons for high turnover in the hospitality sector. AN employee does not stick with his present organization for plethora of reasons; one of the strong reasons is the inability of the organization to provide great environmental condition to work resulting in job satisfaction. The employee in the present day is privy to loads of information available on the internet, which has turned him into a well-informed employee(Kramer, 2004). This has made him understood how various industries are doing so much for their employees to take care of their well-being and encompassing the factors of job satisfaction such as; Leave policies, fringe benefits, monetary benefits, team activities, learning and development, succession planning and so on. When an employee does not see it happening in the hospitality sector, he decides to move to a better job, thus contributing to the turnover of the industry. Hence, it is extremely important to enrich the job with factors of job satisfaction and reduce down the hygiene factors in the job (Ferrary, 2015).

It is often seen that employee empowerment has created quite a stir in the hospitality sector or in every other sector. Transformational leadership and other style of leaderships have understood the value of the employees and have started empowering them by using them in decision making process and giving value to their feedback. It is important not only to bring trust with the employees, but it also makes the employee believe and have faith in the organization. It makes the employee gain faith towards his line managers, and this mutual trust and faith thus becomes the foundation of his sustained association with the organization. Thus, it makes important for HR in the hospitality sector to come up with strategies to engage with the employees, not only through the use of social media, blogs and so on. They have to engage them in taking important decisions related to the organization, treat them like a think-tank for the organization, and ask for their recommendation and feedback on the issues concerning them and the organization. This strategy has been useful in a lot of manufacturing, tech, production industries in the past and the present now is the time to translate the same learning in the service industry and work towards improving the workforce turnover in the sector by retaining the employees (Baum et. al., 2016)

To bring the essay to a logical conclusion, it is of great importance to summarize the points critical in attracting and retaining workforce in the hospitality sector. It is seen that hospitality sector is worst hit by rising problem of employee turnover and its failure to attract the talent in the sector. The hospitality sector is seen to be the worst paying sector and is plagiarized by lower wages; further authoritarian style of leadership in the sector makes it difficult for employees to be a part of this highly challenging and fast paced career. Another major reason behind the difficult in hiring the right talent and retaining them for the sustained growth of the organization is the lack of resources with the right skill sets for the sector. Excellent customer service is the foundation of hospitality sector, hence the potential employee not only has to great with his soft skills, and he has to be a master in the art of understanding the human emotions. This skill set is not easy to be found, thus making it difficult for the hospitality sector in attracting the employees. Numerous significant developments have to be done in the recruitment and the retention strategies of Hospitality sector to make it a truly rewarding sector.

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