This paper provides answers to questions, contained in the case study. The main idea, promoted throughout the paper’s entirety, is that in order for the Cavendish Hall Hotel to be able to increase the quality of the affiliated employees’ performance, the latter should be provided with incentives to become increasingly associated with the company’s corporate values.
The most serious flaw with the design of the payment system (introduced by Daphne Jones), is the fact that it is being based upon the neo-Liberal (Libertarian) assumption that, while addressing their professional duties at work, employees act in the thoroughly autonomous manner, with the prospect of making a monetary profit serving them as the only performance-stimulating incentive (Giroux, 2005).
Within the context of the Libertarian paradigm of management, Jones’s initiative did make a good logical sense. After all, the introduction of her ‘progressive’ payment system should have resulted in increasing the overall extent of the Hotel’s operational efficiency, which in turn should have led towards making this Hotel more commercially competitive.
In the reality, however, the introduction of this system proved to counter beneficial. The reason for this is that, contrary to what Libertarians believe, the functioning of a particular commercial enterprise is not merely the sum of the concerned employees’ professional performances. Rather, it is something that comes as a result of these employees continuing to indulge in the close and personal interaction with each other, while at the workplace.
What it means is that the performance of a commercial organisation cannot be discussed outside of what may be identified as the set of the discursively relevant societal factors – something that never occurred to Jones. Therefore, the implementation of the mentioned payment system was doomed to sustain an utter fiasco from the very beginning.
Apparently, while designing the new payment system in question, Jones remained thoroughly arrogant of the fact that the qualitative aspects of how employees interrelate with each other, affect the Hotel’s overall performance as much, as do the money-related considerations, on these employees’ part.
There can be only a few doubts that the introduction (announcement) of the score-based payment system, on the part of Jones, was not well conceived either. The reasons for us to think in this way are as follows:
- Due to the absence of the thoroughly objective performance-appraisal system, the introduction of Jones’s initiative naturally prompted staff-members to assume that the effectiveness of how they address their professional duties will be somehow reflective of their ability to press guests for tips. This simply could not be otherwise – being an intellectually bright individual is not the main indication of a professional adequacy, on the part of those who seek to be hired as porters or chambermaids.
- After having heard that their performance will be ‘score-tested’ and that even the most underachieving staff-members will still be given a 1 % raise to their salaries, the would-be-affected employees naturally came to conclude that the manner, in which they used to address their professional duties (prior to the system’s introduction), was already fully adequate. This, of course, could not result in anything else but in undermining the effectiveness of the system’s implementation from the very outset.
- The mentioned delay in announcing the managerial decision, as to what would be every individual employee’s salary-raise, naturally prompted staff-members to suspect that there has been a ‘foul play’, within the context of how this decision was being made. This, of course, contributed even further to the fact that, instead of promoting workers to grow ever more professionally committed, the system’s introduction, in fact, resulted in undermining the sense of corporate loyalty, on their part.
There are a number of reasons to believe that the introduction of the ‘forced ranking system’ (proposed by the General Manager), will prove just as ineffective. The main reasons for this are as follows:
- As it appears, this ‘forced ranking system’ is based upon essentially the same conceptual provisions, as it happened to be the case with that of Jones. That is, the system’s designers assumed that the key to increasing the effectiveness of the Hotel’s commercial performance, is providing every individual staff-member with its performance-boosting incentive, without giving much thought to how the concerned employees work, as team-members.
However, as it was pointed out earlier, this approach could possibly prove beneficial, because it ignores the fact that the very realities of a post-industrial living cause just about any commercial organisation (such as the Cavendish Hall Hotel) to function in the increasingly societal mode, as opposed to remaining a strictly commercial entity. - The proposed ‘forced ranking system’ does not seem to offer any reliable mechanisms for ensuring that the assessment of employees’ performance will be thoroughly objective. The reason for this is that it is based upon the assumption that each line manager is fully capable of properly evaluating every individual worker, without being provided with the universally applicable evaluation-criteria, “each line manager will be asked to rank their staff in order of performance”.
After all, as it appears from the case study, the new system’s designers have failed at specifying how the best-performing workers may actually be identified. As the ultimate consequence, each line manager will be tempted to apply its own highly subjective criteria for evaluating employees, which in turn will contribute to the continual deterioration of corporate morale among staff-members.
In order for the performance stimulating payment system to prove effective, it should be fully observant of the earlier mentioned considerations. That is, instead of being concerned with prompting employees to try to ‘outdo’ each other on the line of addressing their professional responsibilities, it should instead aim at endowing the former with the sense of ‘corporate loyalty’.
The validity of this suggestion can be illustrated, in regards to the fact that the very nature of hotel-industry presupposes that, while dealing with clients, porters and chambermaids remain essentially unsupervised. What it means is that the main precondition for them to remain thoroughly committed to taking care of their duties in the professionally responsible manner, they will need to experience the sensation of being emotionally related to what they do.
In this respect, providing staff-members with a 1%-4% raise to their salaries will not have much of a positive effect on their performance. Instead, the Hotel’s top-managers/owners should consider providing employees with the incentives to believe that they truly belong to the company’s corporate culture. There are a number of the potentially applicable strategies, the deployment of which can ensure that this is indeed being the case.
For example, managers may well consider qualifying the most valuable employees for a dental plan or for a company-paid vacation. Also, regardless of what happened to be their seniority status/managerial rank, all employees should be invited to participate in the company’s corporately held events, such as the on-premise celebration of the New Year, for example.
The reason for this is that providing employees with the chance to socialise with their superiors in the informal atmosphere, is one of the main preconditions for the former to grow increasingly related to the company’s corporate values, which in turn should increase their ability to function as team members.
References
Giroux, H. (2005). The terror of Neoliberalism: Rethinking the significance of cultural politics. College Literature, 32 (1), 1-19.