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Sheffield Hallam University: MSc: Hospitality Assignments
Definition of Human Resource Management *
Definition of Competitive advantage *
Identification of key human resource management themes *
Key themes: *
Globalization *
Empowerment *
Flexibility *
Training *
Equal opportunities *
Variable pay *
Teleworking *
Analysis of reasons of "current trends" *
Application of "current trends" to the organisation and competitive advantage. *
Globalization. *
Empowerment *
Flexibility *
Training *
Equal opportunities *
Variable pay *
Teleworking *
Conclusion *
Reference and Resource Pack *
Definition of Human Resource Management
As Harvey (1994) explains "human resource management involves the total management of people within the firm, using the notion of people as valuable assets, increasing in value time, an asset to be used to generate profit or maintain survival in a competitive world."
Mullins (1997) mentions Willman for whom human resource management is concerned with ".... mechanisms through which the organisation attracts candidates for employment, selects them, introduces them to the organisation’s structure and culture, motivates them to perform a given set of tasks, pays them for this and seeks to identify their potential for future development. It is then concerned with systems of promotion, manpower planning, succession planning and coping with labour turnover of one form or another."
Definition of Competitive advantage
As Du Gay (undated) asserts, competitive advantage is encouraging organisations and their participants to become more enterprising. It is a series of techniques for restructuring the internal world of the organisation along "market" lines in order to anticipate and satisfy the needs and desires of the customer and ensure business success. Du Gay refers to Kanter (1990); Pascale (1991); Pinchot (1985) for whom bureaucratic lack of enterprise is transformed into a permanent "win/win" situation through the active development of a flexible, creative and organic entrepreneuralism. As the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) quoted by Du Gay (undated) suggests "enterprising enterprises are those which increasingly turn .... to the people who work for them to develop ... competitive advantage. The winners are those who can organise and motivate their people at all the levels so that they give willingly their ideas, their initiative and their commitment to the continuous improvement that winning requires..... And it is up to those people as individuals to make the difference. They can no longer be treated as part of the collective mass... people want to do a good job, to have opportunities for self development, to contribute their thoughts as well as their physical skills to the team and firms for which they work and to be recognised and rewarded for their whole contribution."
Identification of key human resource management themes
Key themes:
Globalization
Empowerment
Flexibility
Training
Equal opportunities
Variable pay
Teleworking
All of the above concepts or attitudes have been incorporated as part of its human resource management by important companies and these have been extensively commented on in media articles. Many changes are occurring in society and companies should adapt their organisation and management to these changes, achieving better productivity, competitiveness and profit.
Globalization
As Orth 1 (1998) says "The trend toward globalisation will have many effects on managers, creating a more internationally focused human resource department. In the future human resource management will deal with new forms of compensation and benefits as health care and stock options become more popular. While some of these changes are already in the works others are only predictions that may or may not occur."
Empowerment
For Eccles (undated) "Empowerment has become a vogue word for the process of encouraging employees, including managers, to utilise their skills and experience more by giving them the power to use more judgement and discretion in their work".
Flexibility
As Maitland (1999) explains "from today, staff will no longer have to explain to their managers why they want to change their working hours; their case will be decided purely on whether it make sense for the business..... Under this new system, employees who want to work differently, will choose from a menu of options: job-sharing, reduced hours, a compressed working week of, say, four longer days, variable starting and finishing times; and working off-site for one to three days a week."
Training
Da Costa (1999) exposes that to produce quality it is necessary to train staff. "We have to attract the right people into the industry and use structured training programmes to help them to develop the right skills, both for businesses and for their own future."
Orth 1 (1998) quotes Minehan "Both HR managers and employees will have to address how continuous training will take place. HR Managers will have to spell out what skills are required for the job both now and in the future and provide some means of acquiring these skills to (sic) their employees."
Equal opportunities
HCIMA, 2 (1999) says "An equal opportunities at work approach takes as its starting point the fact that some groups can encounter disadvantage in the workplace. For example, women have been dismissed from their jobs because of pregnancy or ethnic minorities experience racist comment at work. Equal opportunity approaches begin with the recognition that this kind of discrimination can occur and then attempt to find ways of removing it from the workplace."
Bozec (1999) quoted Roy Fletcher, who was general manager of an Hotel in Derby who said: "It is time this industry treated everyone equally".
Variable pay
For Anon 2 (1999), "the way companies pay people says a lot about how they see their business. Some companies are putting new emphasis on people as assets together with the downward pressure on cost and employers face an obvious difficulty. They hope to get around it by using pay much more flexibly. Instead of "performance related" pay - too formulaic- the new mantra is "variable" pay : bonuses linked to the performance of the individual, the team or the company; and stock options. In America, pay variability has been increasing for some years and now is advancing in other countries."
Teleworking
As Gordon (1997) exposes, organisational life has changed and it has been for the better. These forms of mobility mean better customer service, more flexibility for the employees, less wasted time sitting in rush-hour traffic jams and improved operating efficiencies for employees. From the perspective of the manager or business owner, Teleworking is one of the most powerful tools for attracting, retaining and getting the best out of your people. "The technology is ready, the employees are ready and the knowledge about how to make Teleworking is widely available".
Analysis of reasons of "current trends"
As already stated above, many changes are occurring in the world and in society. And the field of HR Management cannot escape these changes because organisational life has changed. The mentioned trends are the answer to the companies’ current demands and those of the employees as well. The implementation of these trends in Human Resource management can be "a way without return" because for both, companies and employees, they have benefits.
Companies such as BT, Cane (1999) can save a lot of money if they succeed in persuading a large number of their office staff to work from home, communicating with customers and managers by fax machine, telephone and the internet. On the part of BT staff, Cane, (1999) Teleworking’s appeal can be, the convenience of working at home, carrying out the job from anywhere in the country or the extra time employees can spend in the way they prefer.
Flexibility, Maitland (1999) is a business-strategy which Lloyds TSB is applying with nearly 17,000 of its employees. The benefits to the business such as increased productivity and reduced absenteeism, will for the first time be measurable.
Empowerment is a concept to improve the quality of the service to the customers. Forte group, like many others hotel companies and restaurants, intend that through empowering its employees they would be more committed to success in their service encounters. Harvester’s employees, for example, besides having the necessary discretion and autonomy to do whatever is needed to "delight the customer", they can be accountable for ordering their own stock, carry their own hygiene checks and sort out their own problems or cash-up.
Pay variability has spread in Europe and covers a much wider range of workers than before. Unilever thinks that when "the results aren’t good or people don’t perform well, you don’t have to pay them" Anon 2 (1999). If profits fall, so will pay linked with bonuses.
Application of "current trends" to the organisation and competitive advantage.
Globalization.
This trend is not useful at all for my organisation. The organisation has hotels in Mexico City and Brussels. However the company suffered severe problems four years ago and global expansion plans were shelved indefinitely.
Empowerment
In theory, wider empowerment of individuals throughout the organisation would be a good idea. However, the President owns the company and he is extremely autocratic. It is unlikely that he would see the benefits of empowerment.
Flexibility
There is a subtle difference between flexible working hours and shift work. Shift workers require extra pay for working anti-social hours. Flexible workers see the flexibility as a privilege and thus this could be a way to save money and please the staff. It is important to emphasise that Hospitality is a service business. The staff must be available when the customers so demand. Flexibility for no extra pay can effectively lengthen the time that staff are available to serve customers without additional overtime payments. But flexibility requires agreement with supervisors such as Head Chef, Housekeeper, Front Office managers and of course the General Manager. Nevertheless administrative, non-customer contact staff are more suitable for flexible working.
Training
The owner-president is extremely reluctant to spend money, even in marketing. Other than on health and safety issues, which could cause legal problems for the organisation, he expects staff to be already trained.
Equal opportunities
The Company is a Spanish company. Women have made considerable advances in Banking and Industry over the last fifteen years. But nearly all senior women have such positions because of family ties. It is still common for a man and woman at the same level to paid differently especially in private companies because they think paternally that a man has a family to maintain.
Variable pay
During the company’s downturn, several executives accepted half pay in order to keep the jobs. This experience could be developed but it remains to be seen if pay would rise in the good times.
The concept of variable pay could be also be extended to making staff self-employed in which case contracts could be terminated easily. Out-sourcing of non-core services such as accounting, legal and IT would provide flexibility. Even the food cooking could be out-sourced.
Teleworking
The vast majority of workers in hospitality are involved with face-to-face customer service such as waitresses, front office or are required to be on the premises like chefs or housekeepers. Teleworkers could be staff in reservation, marketing, sales, purchasing, accounting and the legal department.
Conclusion
Du Gay (undated) has been quoted above on Competitive Advantage. He quoted the CBI "The winners are those who can organised and motivate their people at all levels." Savage (1999) writes that men are reluctant to enter into flexible working so as to provided them with "protection against competition from able women held back because they work flexibly. Quite a lot of it is about loss of competitive advantage on an individual basis"
Current methods of Human resource Management can indeed provide a powerful competitive advantage to any organisation. However the president and the Board of Directors have to see the real need for and benefit from such methods.
Reference and Resource Pack
| Anon 1 "Priced out of a job"( May 1999) The Economist - A Survey of Pay - 8 May 1999 |
| Anon 2 "A fair days pay" ( May 1999) The Economist - A Survey of Pay - 8 May 1999 |
| Anon 3 "The best...and the rest" (May 1999) The Economist - A survey of pay- 8 May 1999 |
| Anon 4 "Hotels without managers may lose out". (1999) Caterer & Hotelkeeper.3 March 1999. Pg.6. |
| Bozec Louise " Racism in catering mirrors the police" (March 1999) Caterer & Hotelkeeper March 1999 |
| Cacciope R. "Structured empowerment: and award-winning program at the Burswood Resort Hotel" (1998) MCB Leadership & Organisation Development Journal, Vol 19,Issue 5. |
| Cane, Alan "Pioneer Teleworkers feel at home" (1999) Financial Times- 12 May 1999 |
| Cane, Alan "BT aims to turn a tenth of its staff into Teleworkers"(1999) Financial Times -12 May 1999 |
| Christensen Hughes Julia. "Human Resource Management: Barriers to Longer Term View "MCB Conference 1996. |
| Da Costa, Michael " Short of good staff ? Let’s grow our own" (1,999) Caterer &Hotelkeeper. 7 April 1999. Pg. 20. |
| Du Gay and Salaman, Graeme "The Cult [ure] of the Customer" (undated) The Open University, Walton Hall Milton Keynes. |
| Eccles, Tony "The Deceptive Allure of Empowerment" (undated) Long Range Planning . Vo16 No.6. |
| Gordon, Gil E. " Doing the Office without the Office" (1997) HR Magazine Dec.1997 Recruitment Agenda. |
| Gribben, Roland "City personnel heads ‘ frequently ignored’ (1997) Electronic Telegraph. Issue 608. |
| Guerrier, Yvonne. "Hospitality Human Resource Management" (1989) Personnel Review, Vol 18, No.1, 1989 MCB University. |
| Harris, David "Don’t just come to praise hotel staff- reward them.( 1,999) Caterer & Hotelkeeper. 3 March 1999, Pg.17 |
| Harvey, Barbara (1994) School of Leisure and Food Management MSc Hospitality Management. |
| HCIMA "Managing Diversity" (May 1999) No.1 |
| HCIMA "Equal Opportunities" (May 1999) No.2 |
| Lashley, Conrad. "Towards an understanding of employee empowerment in hospitality services" (1,995) MCB International of Contemporary Hospitality Management. Vol 07 Issue 1 |
| Maitland, Alison "A job that suits you lifestyle" Management: Flexible Working (1999) Financial Times, 6 May 1999 |
| Maitland, Alison "Workers caught in a mantrap" (1999) Financial Times, 12 May 1999 |
| Moran, Juan (1999) Meta 4 Expertise: Human Resources. http://meta4.com/x-hr.htm. |
| Mullins, Laurie J. Hospitality Management : A Human Resources Approach (1992) Pitman. |
| Open University "The Effective Manager" Book 3 "Managing People"(1994) |
| Orth, Michael 1 Trends in Human Resource. California Polytechnic Papers 17 Jun 1998 |
| Orth, Michael 2 "The Future of the Workforce" 4 December 1998 |
| Peters, John "The real meaning of Empowerment" Personnel Management Nov. 1993 |
| Savage, Carol "Flexible Working and Male professionals: Can’t change, Won’t change." The Resource Connection, May 1999 |
| Snyder H, Neil, and Graves, Michele "Leadership and Vision " Business Horizons, January-February 1994 |
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Sheffield Hallam University: MSc: Hospitality Assignments