Employe Loyalty in Hotel Essay

The essence of competition among hotels is the competition of human resource. If a group of skilled, sophisticated, and loyal employees can be retained by hotels, high quality of service, hotel brand and honor, and revenue can be guaranteed to a large extent. As a result, employee loyalty is one of the core competitiveness of hotel, largely influencing and determining the further development. Also, employee loyalty is one of the indicators of the performance Human Resource Management in a hotel. Employee loyalty is expressed by the behaviors and attitudes that are showed by hotel employees (Ineson & Berechet, 2011). With increasingly severe competition, the quality of product and productivity determine the destiny of a company. The employees who work longer are more familiar with the mission and vision of the company and regular working procedures, with the understanding of how to improve productivity and quality and save the costs, which are the competitive advantages of a company. Employees are part of hotels assets. The society also raises attention to employees’ loyalty, since employees turnover rises with low loyalty, which leads to a series of problems, like unemployment. Before a hotel employs new staffs, the on duty employees will undertake loads of responsibilities. High employee turnover will bring hotel to a chaos and revenue loss. Consequently, employee loyalty counts when dealing with high employee turnover. High employee loyalty can bring in lucrative benefit to hotel by reducing the recruitment and training costs, improving labor productivity, and creating more revenue. Also, the organization structure will be stable with high employee loyalty, stimulating the execution of tasks of related departments and achieving the continuing development. Besides, a specialty of hospitality management is that part-time employees play an important role in the delivery of guest service. Hotel could benefit a lot from properly managing part-time employees by saving training costs. So, part-time employees are another potential group of loyal employees, from which talents might be discovered. Currently, with much more choices are provided to the market, people are given more alternatives and chances, among which there is one that they cherish most and is suitable for their career development, the high employee turnover is a serious problem, which is urging to solve. In the following content, this article is going to talk about the factors that impact employee loyalty, both full-time and part-time, and different ways to improve employee loyalty. Factors that impact employee loyalty Individual Characteristics Individual characteristics, such gender, age, job tenure, and job position, have some impact on employee loyalty. For instance, for older (>40 years old) employees, job security, good maternity/paternity packages, a convenient workplace location, and a planned career path are most important, which reflect their life cycle priorities (Ineson & Berechet, 2011). Also, young employees (25-35 years old) have more ambitious to break rules and make decision without hesitation as long as there are more promising opportunities. Gender difference is obvious in hotels. Traditionally, men are supposed to be the bread-maker in a family, so most cleaning is done by women in the hotel, including the public area and guest rooms. Besides, job position has an impact on employees’ attitudes towards employee loyalty, which means that different hierarchical positions show different employee loyalty in hotel (Ineson & Berechet, 2011). Attitude toward Work With the globalization of economy, the facilities and techniques in hotel industry improve a lot, and so does employees attitude towards career path, changing from consistency to variety—developing through career ladder. In the past, most people’s first job is the last one, whose attitude toward job is that the more stable, the better. Now, however, it is not rare to be told that one’s colleague left to another hotel for further development, mostly because of better opportunities for personal development. Other employees may pay much attention on relatively clean and comfortable working environment offered by most hotels. Since the product of hotel is service, which relies on the direct communication between frontline employees and guests, both frontline employees and managers will deal with all kinds of relations with guests and colleagues, or physical work. If employees’ attitude toward their job is uninterested from the beginning, it’s very hard for hotel to build up employee loyalty. Attitude is everything. Job Commitment and Job Satisfaction Job commitment is measured by how employees feel about the hotel as a whole. It is the degree to which an employee identifies with the organization and is the desire to staying with the organization (Wanda & Salazar, 2011). Job commitment refers to both employees and hotels share goals and values, and willingness to work on behalf of the hotel. Employees can achieve their goals through the success of hotel, which is a win-win situation. Job commitment and job satisfaction are related: job commitment is to measure how’s the employees feel about the hotel; job satisfaction is to measure fulfillment with a specific job. Job satisfaction is strongly associated with employee loyalty. It is easy to work out that satisfied employees will work hard and provide high quality service to guests. Then employees will receive positive response from satisfied guests, which will give employees a sense of fulfillment and increase their loyalty. A virtuous cycle begins. Payroll and Benefits Payroll and benefits are the most direct factors that influence employee loyalty. A high payroll and benefit packages can always retain employee, which just satisfied the most basic needs of living. The most common situation in China is the huge gap between the payroll of managers and frontline employees. Undertaking loads of work and directly dealing with various guests, frontline employees are always offered low payroll, compared with the payroll of hotel managers or with the average salary in the market. Payroll is the most direct factor and may have negative impact on employees’ motivation and it is often the first consideration when people choose jobs. People will naturally compare the payroll and benefit with different hotels. When a feeling of unfairness on payroll arises, the tendency of leaving and slowing down will increase. Training and Opportunities to Develop New Skills Training is one of Human Resource most visible functions. The opportunities of develop new skills measure the management of training program. Training will not only enhance the skills and proficiency in dealing with regular working, but also give employees a sense of fulfillment through learning and making progress. It is also a way to show the care to employees. Hotels who do not invest in employee training cannot see the progress their employees made and the rise of productivity, which is not a long-tern development trategy. Mastering more skills after training, employees will have a much better understanding of their responsibilities, become more qualified to their positions and provide much better service to guests. Training management can be measure by employee satisfaction and guests satisfaction. Factors mentioned above are those that mainly impact full-time employees. Some of them may also work on part-time employee, but the ma in factor that impact part-time employees’ loyalty and commitment is the levels of support received from hotels and supervisors. As mentioned above, employees’ strong commitment will result in greater loyalty and better behaviors. Hotel manager should understand that commitment is a double- way communication. Research indicates that employees who perceive their managers’ commitment will be also committed to their organizations, resulting in much better performance and exceeding hotels’ expectations (Misty, 2009). Additionally, since part-time employees expect less than full-time employees, they will savor the moment of value when treated as part of the organization.