PART 2 WHO WE EMPLOY MATTERS: SOMETHING MUST CHANGE

Egi Gaisie, a Hotel Educator/Trainer, talks with Kodjo Hazel a former Human Resource Manager of Golden Tulip Hotel, Accra and Alisa Hotel, Accra respectively. He is currently a Human Resource Consultant in the hotel industry.

This session focuses on his general opinions about personnel working in the hotel industry in Ghana.
The discussion has raised various concerns which has been lingering in the industry for far too long. I intend to address them at an appropriate time on this platform. Welcome.

Question: What have you found to be unique in managing personnel in the hotel industry?

Response: Very interesting; you manage all manner of people, i.e. religious groups, ethnic associates, interests groups, etc. The important thing is how the HR person is able to convert them into customer-service providers.

Follow-up: Are these groupings in relation to personnel in hotels?

Response: Yes, there are many informal ‘unseen’ groups that can make organizational behavior difficult to manage.

Question: General observations deduced from talking with heads of departments of hotels give me the impression that current personnel in the hotel industry do not seem ready to commit themselves to learning, thus the high turnover.  Can you confirm this? And why do you think this is a trend?

Response: This assertion may be true to only a limited extent. The reality is that most heads of department do not really commit themselves in making learning and development an organic part of modern day hotel’s organizational and strategic philosophy.

High staff turnovers may themselves not be entirely negative in as much as they can also serve as growth factors for other hotels.

Generally, learning and development is not taken seriously. The caliber of personnel usually hired requires much more attention in training than is given.

Question: How important is language in the hotel industry in Ghana? How do you think we are doing in this area?

Response: Language is a baseline requirement for effective communication. We are not doing well at all; even when statutory regulations require us to do so; not even in our own local languages and dialects let alone the foreign ones.

There is the urgent need to drill deep in the area of language expansion as this is also becoming a universal cultural standard in the industry.

Question: Hotels are in the business of selling intangibles- unique experiences. How do Employers get their personnel to create those unique experiences?

Response: Through

•          Continuous well-designed training programs, at all levels and which will meet market needs

•          Productivity measurements along with desired performance motivational programs

•          Total practical exposure, at all levels, on the workings of the hotel

•          Exchange programs with sister-hotels, both local and abroad

•          Bench marking

•          Continuous research and development on industry trends

Question:  What role do you play in the above?

Response: Virtually any or all of them.

Question: How would you describe the status of the hotel work force in Ghana? 

Response: Very despondent, laid-back and lethargic. A lot of individualism, less teamwork, largely unskilled and unprofessional at all levels; highly mercenary and predatory. However I must add that this is through no fault of theirs. 

Follow-up: Wow, that suggests a lot to be done on us. Where does one start? Who should start it and how? 

Response: It is a huge task. Private hotel owners need to demonstrate care beyond their projects. Once profits are assured they seem to care little about staff development; only a few are committed.

Question: Productivity in most of our hotels seems low yet hotel personnel feel very stressed and exhausted. What are the challenges?

Response: Most of our hotels do not have strategic plans; they are very commercial and developmental, spending on the product and not as required on the staff.

 to be continued.

WHO WE EMPLOY MATTERS-SOMETHING MUST CHANGE

Egi Gaisie, a Hotel Educator/Trainer, talks with Kodjo Hazel a former Human Resource Manager of Golden Tulip Hotel, Accra and Alisa Hotel, Accra respectively. He is currently a Human Resource Consultant in the hotel industry.

This session focuses on the mentality of people towards hotel jobs and towards working in the hotel industry in Ghana.

The discussion led me to various other areas of concern which has been lingering in the industry for far too long and which I intend to address at the appropriate time on this platform. Welcome.

Question: You must have interviewed hundreds of applicants and handled several more application letters over the years as a Human Resource Manager. How would you describe the general attitude of people wanting to work in the hotel industry?

Response: Most new entrants perceive hotel work as basic household daily chores. Thus most applications lack the requisite professional contents for specialized and critical positions. An applicant who has practiced cooking at home feels highly qualified to be employed as a cook in a modern hotel kitchen. This runs through for most of the departments.

Follow up: Are you suggesting there is a general lack of understanding among applicants as to what qualifications are expected of them? Vacancy announcements I have seen have specific and detailed job requirements.

Response: Yes but even when job adverts are well laid out, applicants look at the positions as what they merely do in their respective homes; as in cooking, cleaning rooms or serving food. Often there are pressures from hotel owners and other stakeholders to just place 'their people' irrespective of their qualifications.

Question: How well do applicants know the industry they wish to work in?

Response: Most applicants come in very naïve about the activities/workings of the industry. One of the major contributory factors to high turnovers is the abject lack of the workings of the hotel industry.

 Follow up: Kindly explain further what you mean.."the abject lack of the workings of the hotel industry."

Response: They liken hotel jobs to basic household jobs done in the homes.

Follow-up: Considering all that you have said what kind of orientation is given to those who are employed?

Response: I normally give a three day orientation to the newly employed.

Follow-up: What is the content of such an orientation?

Response: There is a general orientation of the hotel industry, a departmental orientation, a physical tour of the hotel and a session for ‘Questions and Answers’ with all the department heads sitting in. When the newly employed go to their respective departments their departmental heads are expected to conduct on-the-job training. This is where commitment to training is slack.

Question: Outside this country, ‘leads’ such as handshakes, smiles, eye contact have been used to determine whom to shortlist for an interview. In Ghana, what peculiar ‘leads’ guide you to shortlist applicants?

Response: The prevailing culture in the industry is universal. Criteria for selection may, therefore, not be segmented, notwithstanding the fact that a few local standards may be counted during selection. Some of these criteria are also regulated by statutes.

Follow-up: I am not sure I understand what you mean.

Response: First of all, I like to refer to these ‘leads’ as standards. In the hotel industry the culture is the same irrespective of where your hotel is located. So we need to apply international standards; eye contact, positive engagement, smile etc There may be  slight variations  such as the addition of   local flavors e.g. in Japan, bowing rather than shaking of hands. Eye contacts, smiles, mentioning guests’ names, handshakes, etc. are basic ingredients for creating the desired experiences for customers who may have everything that the hotel has but these. In Ghana, if an employee gestures a bow to a Japanese guest, it makes him/her feel at home. But these are little touches the employee should pick up through self development.

Question: Generally, how prepared do you find individuals who are attending an interview? I am making reference to operational personnel (personnel below supervisory status).

Response: Candidates appearing at interviews are mostly ill-prepared even at the higher supervisory and managerial levels.

Follow-up: So perhaps we would devote a session on this, I mean supervisory and management level personnel.

Question: Service cannot be forced out of people. Yet we see people working in specific hotels pushing for their relatives to be employed. What are your views?

Response: This practice is highly unacceptable. In most of the private hotels Ghana, it is commonplace to find the owners populate some or all the departments with close relations believing that they can act as “moles” to protect and safeguard their intended profits. Practical evidence, on the contrary, points to a situation where such nepotistic practices have led to huge losses of revenue through plain and undercover sabotage.

Professionalism, experience and performance should dictate the selection of persons into the industry.

Question: What advice would you give to students going to their first job interview in a hotel?

Response:

•          Professional knowledge and practical skills

•          All-round knowledge of the job-specification bordering the position advertised

•          An in-depth research into the corporate vision, mission and the core values of the industry

•          The extent to which the candidate can impact the position and the hotel within a period of time

•          Presentation on how the candidate intends to chart a growth-path in the Hotel within the space of time

 Thank you for this session.

MARBLE & STEEL MAY CREATE HOTELS OF DAZZLING BEAUTY BUT THE HEART & SOUL OF HOTELS ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD ARE THEIR EMPLOYEES.

                             Anonymous

BEYOND THE BRICK AND MORTAR: HOTEL EMPLOYEES

The first hotel I worked in was big, at least by Ghanaian standards; 166 rooms. It housed not only the guestrooms but eating places, formal and informal; a  bar, entertainment and leisure facilities, two retail shops, a bank, hairdressing salon & barber shop, a desk each for car rentals and a travel agency. There were banqueting and conference facilities as well. As far as I was concerned then, it was a world within a world, because everything a guest wanted was within reach. I was a front desk clerk/ a hotel receptionist.

It was not long before I entered into the world of the Hiltons, Sheratons, Marriott’s, and many others. I was ‘wowed’ by their sheer size, the number of rooms; the varied facilities under one roof, the glamour on display and the details! 

What I imagined to be a world within a world in Ghana became like a drop in a bucket. Today the largest hotels in the world have between 4,219 rooms (Ambassador City Jomtien (Thailand), and 7,351 rooms Genting Highlands, Pahang, Malaysia. Can you imagine the size of their workforce? And how they are managed?

Without personnel, hotels are simply huge structures of mere brick and mortar. Like any organization however, their success or failure depend upon their employees.

As a prelude to hosting a colleague professional whose area of specialization is human resources, I thought I should provide my readers some basic information by which we could all base our judgments when we begin objective assessments of ourselves. Nothing is more dangerous than being faced with a problem or difficulty and ignoring it. So let us take the bull by the horn!

People holding positions in the hotel industry may broadly be divided into categories; unskilled, semi-skilled and skilled and managerial. Men dominate managerial positions (not that this really matters but it may serve as crucial information later). Shift work and long hours seem to be a norm. In Ghana, there also seems to be a wide disparity in working conditions (including pay) between employees of privately owned and operated Ghanaian hotels and those owned and managed by international groups. It must be noted also that by GTA(Ghana Tourism Authority) statistics about a whooping 70% of licensed formal accommodation establishments are budget hotels and only approximately 24% are star-rated while the remaining 6% are operating as guest houses.

It is obvious that employees are hired to carry out specific tasks culminating as ‘jobs’. The personnel’s continuous stay on the job depends on performance, all things being equal.

Employee performance generally has to do with the application of effective effort. In the first place employees must be putting the right amount of effort into their work. This effort will be ineffective if the employee does not have the skills and abilities to carry out the tasks assigned to the standard required; the right personnel. Having right personnel is JUST part of the whole equation to performance!

If the job has not been correctly designed to be efficient or the standards expected have not been communicated, time, energy and consumables are wasted. There is need to determine tasks with their standards; the right job. 

A right atmosphere is required to support personnel and to avoid conflict. Employees must be scheduled to cope with the peaks and lows of demand; the right place at the right time.

Performance then, is the right person applying the right effort to the right job in the right atmosphere in the right place at the right time.

In discussing personnel issues among hotel owners and managers, ‘performance’ seems to be a concern however words I hear seem to be in discord with actions observed.

You can be the difference!

COMING IN NOVEMBER 2017

HOSTING A HUMAN RESOURCE 

PROFESSIONAL IN THE HOTEL INDUSTRY

ON THIS PLATFORM

THE HOTEL FRONT DESK: A SLIPPERY WORK ENVIRONMENT?

The hotel front desk is unlike front desks of many businesses normally referred to as the reception desk. Regardless of the class or type of the hotel, the front desk is the most visible and the focal point of a hotel’s activity. It is the communication center of the hotel with a great amount of guest contact. 

The functions of the hotel front desk include the sale of hotel rooms, guest registration and room assignments; the handling of guest requests, maintenance of guest accounts, cashiering and providing information. The financial tasks usually handled by front desk personnel include receiving cash payments, handling guest folios, verifying cheques, handling foreign currency and credit cards.

During my time at the front desk, hotels in Ghana could generally be considered to be 'manual.'  The front desk had a metal file system that consisted of pockets to hold rooming and reservations slips, called the room rack. It is from this system that the term 'rack rate', the undiscounted price a hotel will charge for a room, is derived. 

Many mid-sized and small hotel operations in Ghana are still largely manual. Few are semi-automated and unsophisticated with very little controls, considering the computerization and other technological updates in the hotel world today. The consequences are leakages in hotel revenues.

When I first entered the hotel industry as a front desk clerk, my immediate supervisor said to me, ‘in this business there is plenty of money, plenty of males and plenty of food and drinks…’ 

I in turn, have over the years, amended  this warning to: ‘there is plenty of money, plenty of females and males and plenty of food and drinks.’ The temptations to ‘borrow’ money or give in to the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes are strong. 

My supervisor was cautioning a then naïve young lady to be self disciplined and to uphold good morals. I am glad he did; for it is easy to get caught up in the schemes of unsuspected guests, even coworkers or even loose guard of one's own values if those values are not deep rooted.

As a manager in the industry, I have met a few front desk personnel get themselves into trouble when they genuinely went out of their way to help or offer services requested for by guests; failure to follow procedures. Alas, there are too many stories, however, about theft and practices of fraud front desk personnel get themselves entangled in:

A potential guest walks in, requesting for a room. He claims he cannot afford the full rate of the room so the front desk personnel, whether or not empowered, agrees to slash the room rate and fails to formally register the guest. The guest comes in at a particular time of the day,and is expected to leave by a specific time least this scheme be discovered. Obviously, the money paid is not accounted for. Somehow, personnel find ways to ensure the room looks clean. Should the room be partially accounted for, be sure there will be no receipt to cover the transaction. 
Front office personnel write paid outs to guests even there has been no transaction. This may never be discovered as this process involves withdrawal of cash from the front office float staff. 
Services intended to be complimentary are charged to guests who may not be in-house without accounting for it. 

When it comes to credit card fraud, a number of our small hotels seem to be immune to it since most of them do not accept credit cards.However personnel have ways of making money off hotels which operate forex bureau.

Inaccuracies in records may also lead to fraud. This may be prevalent in manual and semi-automated front offices where personnel post wrong charges to guest folios and the same individual does the night auditing function. Sometimes non-resident guests may make cash payments on outstanding account balances by cash and these are sometimes not accounted for.

These practices are heart breaking since the front desk position is one of  many positions in hotels where personnel can easily climb up to become hotel managers.

My research seems to suggest that eliminating employee theft entirely is almost impossible. The problem of employee theft in hotels is an age-old problem, they say. Hotels, by nature, present numerous opportunities for employee theft, from guests and the house. No employer hires an employee thinking that the employee is someday going to steal.   

Perhaps an orientation addressing the above and educating personnel on developing their career goals in this industry may serve as caution signage from slipping.