Introduction
The Cyprus Rose Valley Ventura Hotel’s case presents an opportunity for training and employee development. The intervention can improve employee reaction, provide opportunities for organizational learning, and change the behavior of the human resource department to achieve better results for the hotel. The location of the hotel is in the Mediterranean tourist market.
Carrying the “Rose Valley” brand name as part of its name means that the hotel is supposed to offer excellent services to customers. Its loyal and new customers expect to get world-class services whenever they are staying at the hotel. This report reviews the hotel’s case study to highlight problems with its human resources that hinder it from delivering the expected high-quality customer care services, especially in its restaurant departments.
The business/organization context and key issue
The hotel has poor customer service at its Snack Shack and has to achieve appropriate employee training and motivation to address the situation. It also faces a problem of employee underperformance in the Paradise Cub Restaurant. The management needs to come up with ways of improving employee performance. Also, overall staff behavior is incongruent with the hotel’s vision. Some of the reasons are under training and a poor mix of skills and roles. The workers exhibit changing behavior towards other members of staff and the customers, with negative behavior affecting the reputation of the hotel.
The hotel is facing a competitive threat as other hotels in the same target market are improving their offerings. At the same time, customers can compare offerings and service delivery standards of different hotels using various internet tools. Therefore, the Cyprus Rose Valley Ventura Hotel cannot afford to let its service delivery status continue to deteriorate. The negative remarks by guests about its staff and food, as well as overall services hurt the hotel’s brand and the overall “Rose Valley” brand.
On the other hand, the hotel is facing a human resource problem. Its human resource department (HRD) needs to establish ways of cultivating employee relationships and ensuring that there is a collaborative team working on the management staff and supervisors. The hotel recently underwent a refurbishment to improve its main attractions. However, a similar upgrade has not occurred for its human resources and tensions in modes of operation, and work-related stress continues to affect employees, such that they are unable to offer optimal services to customers.
There is a problem with the identification of guest needs. The hotel understands that it receives different kinds of guests in various periods. For example, in the high season, it gets families with children. However, the hotel continues to offer the same kind of services and follows similar protocols both during the high season when there are families with children and during low seasons when its customers are older couples or singles. Therefore, there is a mismatch in customer expectations and the services delivered.
The identification of learning and employee development needs
The hotel is facing a shortfall of revenue, despite its renovation. Therefore, it cannot afford to hire more employees to reduce job roles per employee. On the other hand, it continues to experience an increase in the number of guests, although many are yet to prefer taking their meals in the hotel. Thirdly, its restaurants also serve guests from other hotels in the area. Therefore, its biggest factor for the improvement of employee performance is an increase in individual employee efficiency. It needs to impact relevant management skills to respective heads of restaurants to ensure they can transfer skills and capabilities to the kitchen and waiting staff.
Another major problem is employee turnover due to poor working conditions and strictness. While strictness is good for the standardization of practices, rules that inhibit creativity, employee voice, and efficient delivery of service are hurting the overall quality of service at the hotel. The current need, based on the case study, is to define clearly and enforce employee relationships amongst all staff members. There is a need for cohesiveness and understanding of job demands, personal preferences, and capabilities, with opportunities for expression of organizational citizenship behavior.
As such, the hotel needs to come up with rewards and discipline programs. Besides, it must establish a training framework that equips all employees with the relevant job and people handling capabilities to allow them to function optimally in their respective capacities (Mike 20).
Employees need stretching opportunities where they can exercise their varied skills within an organization, other than relying on promotions. This can provide them with a meaningful passion for their jobs. It can also help the management to identify chances for employee and job skill matching for consideration in future promotions and job realignments (CIPD 28).
Although the teams are separated in their respective job centers, the HRD needs to show deep involvement and connection to overall organization activity. This should allow the HRD to address employee impacts on an organization collectively (Paton 8). According to Churchard (par. 3), employee dissatisfaction with career training and development can arise when the expectations of the employee do not match the provisions of an employer. In the hotel’s case, employees expect intensive training before assuming work, but the management prefers on the job training, which exposes employees to a mistake-prone environment (Baker 89-91).
The hotel is not practicing what it preaches. Its learning and development culture is not present and employees are not getting the engagement they need. Employees feel neglected. As a result, they prefer to quit rather than raise issues with the management. The hotel management at the supervisory level needs to have development plans for all employees to provide two-way feedback with steps that ensure employees and the organization gain from the development opportunities presented in the relationship (Stone par. 2).
Rather than implement best practices for the hotel industry, such as on-the-job learning frameworks, the management has to offer personalized career support for both skilled and semi-skilled workers (Phillips par. 4). This is a requirement for effective professional development that can address high employee turnover problems (Lumsden 45).
Although the hotel recognizes the need for employees to undergo training, it cannot rely on a simple option of sending them to training programs. First, it has to ensure that the training programs’ goals are similar to the hotel’s performance goals. Secondly, the demographic differences between employees and customers must be considered when going ahead with the development of training programs to ensure that results support the vision of the hotel (Helyer and Lee 566). Young people will be the majority of many jobs in the kitchen and the various restaurants in the hotel. It is important to understand their expectations can contrast those of management (Sorensen par. 3).
Another important aspect that the hotel’s management has to consider is the factors that motivate its employees, which will allow it to come up with relevant reward management strategies. It should ensure that the initiatives are supportive of employee expectations at different levels and support the existing or new programs on compensation and job assignment used by the HRD (Sorensen par. 3-4). The fundamental question to ask is what matters most to the people making up the organization, and how the management can be responsive and flexible enough to address concerns and provide a reliable pathway for success (Glaveli and Karassavidou 2892).
Design
The training and development of employees will be an in-house initiative. The training methods that will be used are case studies, films and videos, role-playing, and coaching. These methods will serve the identified needs of the hotel. The role-playing strategy will use job rotation as a way of realizing other skills of employees and impacting them with new skills. Job rotation should lead to a better appreciation of colleagues and their tasks.
It should also result in discussions on workflow improvement to reduce delivery times for meals and other services rendered to customers (Mello 59). As a result, there should be sufficient cohesion among employees and a reduction in job and management demands. One consequence of the changes would be an improvement in the work environment, making it favorable for additional behavior interventions. Overall, the design should work to improve employee motivation and reduce employee turnover (Noe 78-80; Swart 102).
Under job rotation, employees move from one position to another and increase their overall knowledge. However, in the case of the hotel, job rotation will happen as a training strategy. Therefore, employees who are rotating their jobs will not be subject to the exact job roles as their counterparts who are trained for a particular job. Instead, they will only be subjected to apprenticeship opportunities, where they will be allowed to make mistakes as part of their learning. On the other hand, job rotation will include permanent departmental transfers as part of an employee development program (Tobin and Pettingel 111).
Here, the company will be preparing its staff members for future management roles. Besides, departmental transfers can serve as job promotions, especially for employee categories that provide no room for career advancement (Saks and Belcourt 20).
The employees will go through simulations when they are being oriented to their jobs for the first time. The management will place the new staff on simulations, instead of having new staff members join other experienced employees when they join the hotel (Lawson 9). These will be unique on-the-job training options where new employees will go through different real-life situations. Employees will be evaluated in a controlled work environment, and their limits to behavior, interaction, expectations, and skills can be tested.
Also, simulation can continue even when employees are assigned to particular jobs (Cannings and Hills). Here, the hotel will combine job rotation within a department and management coaching to create control environments that employees will participate during their job evaluation period (Passmore 48-49).
The training design will use the ‘in the company off the job’ variation for the management staff. Meanwhile, the subordinate staff members will go through ‘in the company on the job’ training. On the other hand, development opportunities will be available in both strategies. The people undergoing training will be the line management staff throughout the hotel’s departments. The subordinate employees at the respective kitchen and dining areas in the hotel will also be part of the training. There will be a need for a time set aside for formal training of employees, which will require additional structural adjustments to current job processes.
The design also focuses on emotions as an essential attribute of influencing employee and management behavior. When employees feel they are working in a stressed environment, they are unlikely to exhibit hospitality-based behaviors towards customers or their colleagues. Meanwhile, their job performance requires a high degree of people management skills and intentions. In this regard, training that appeals to employee emotions and equips them with empathetic skills will be relevant to the hotel’s situation. Resultantly, the training program will include various options for inter-employee and employee-manager conversations that are open-ended (Truss, Mankin and Kelliher 123-124).
The purpose will be to increase dialog in the organization and to improve tacit knowledge sharing in the realization of the need to support both formal and informal training. All managers will be expected to meet with employees under them at least once a week and have job-related conversations for at least twenty minutes to ensure that there is sufficient dialog going on. The expectation is that the conversations can be a channel for employees to express their ideas and understand the perspectives of the managers as they make difficult decisions. Overall, a dialog will present HR with the privilege of shaping organizational culture such that staff members learn about themselves and can make the customers feel happy (Taylor par. 4-6).
Currently, much of the work of the employees feel robotic, and that is why they are not expressing any emotions towards the customers. However, improving conversations and increasing worker participation in management decisions at the departmental level will enhance their ownership of service delivery at the hotel. They will, therefore, express more concern about client feedback and requests. The expectation is that employees and their line managers will be able to work out formal and informal ways of responding to fluctuations in the demand for their service to customers (Gifford par. 3-5).
Delivery plan
Training will begin with all kitchen staff. They will be taken through meetings, where they will be informed of the available career development, skill development, and relationship development opportunities put in place by the management. This preparation stage should also bring out any concerns of the employees, and the managers will respond immediately. The management will then take part in a seminar to guide their approach in imparting the necessary skills to employees and being supportive of employee development. Also, there will be a joint simulation exercise after specified time intervals, where the management will take part in employee roles while the employees do management tasks to a varying degree that is relevant to their abilities.
The preference for using the existing staff and management comes from the realization that there are insufficient funds for supporting an overall training program by external consultants. Meanwhile, the HRD management will be recording individual and group progress in the training programs and use the preliminary assessment to recommend different training and development interventions to particular employees (Beatson, “Warning: Megatrends” par. 3). For example, when an employee continues exhibiting reservations about being cooperative with other staff, the problem can be investigated and the employee put on coaching intervention. Coaches will be employees and management staff members appointed for their proficiency in service delivery (Overton par. 5).
Employees will go through the simulation for a week. They will participate in dialog sessions throughout their employment contract period. The management will have to report on the attainment of training objectives every week to the HRD. Their reports will include dialogue, personal interventions, solved and existing problems, changes in attitude, development of new workflows, and any other intervention created or implemented to fulfill the goals of the training and development program. As learning continues organically, the HRD should be able to come up with a program for interdepartmental transfers in three months to support job rotation objectives considered critical for the employee development program (Hopgood par. 8).
Evaluation
The evaluation in all stages will follow four levels; reaction, learning, behavior, and results. These follow Kirkpatrick’s evaluation model guidelines for evaluating training programs (Kirkpatrick 26). The four levels address the significant aspects of dealing with sustainability issues such that the effects of employee development carry-on once a training program is over. Appropriate evaluation should also ensure that lessons are learned, and future development initiatives are an improvement of the current one.
The project will be successful when there are improvements in customer and employee interaction. The level of tension in the respective kitchens most affected by poor empathetic behavior by employees and their managers will also be an indicator of improvement. Another indicator will be the reports collected by the HRD about employee participation in dialogue and job simulation opportunities available.
Besides, feedback delivered formally and informally to the HRD will serve as a source of information for the evaluation of the interventions carried out to improve employee job performance outcomes. Here, the emphasis will be on the results got by HRD, as well as the reaction that employees affected by the training will be having towards their jobs and their workmates (Kirkpatrick 30).
The HRD will consider what each employee was expected to do in a week and then review their actual performance. The review will include the number of problems that the employee identified and the effort to correct or report the problems that the employee made. The managers will be evaluated on their participation in dialogue, their initiative to improve workflow, their facilitation of employee job rotation, and their transfer of skills and knowledge to employees (Doyle par. 3-4).
The overall performance report of a department or a staff member will consider the inputs, processes, consequences, conditions, and feedback realized during an intervention. The opportunity cost of particular employee roles and the overall program will also form part of the evaluation. The hotel will consider what it misses as part of accommodating new processes of work (Beatson, “Time to Tackle” par. 3).
Meanwhile, the effectiveness of the training will be determined by the ability of the employees to find time to perform training-related tasks and the speed of improvement that employees report. The overall motivation exhibited by attendance, feedback, and overall observation for training and development, as well as the inter-employee relationship, will be another evaluation factor to consider (Lancaster par. 2-3). Here, the objective will be to find out whether staff members are putting their learning into use.
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