Having attained the information gained from research will provide the knowledge to determine the various methods of employee retention that should be endorsed, sustaining the high turnover rates of employees within the industry. Background information on employee turnover, and retention rates.High staff turnover rates in the hospitality industry are costing £272 million per year just in the United Kingdom due to a crisis in the productivity. It is estimated that by 2022, approximately 993,000 new staff will be needed in the UK, whilst 870,000 would be replacing existing staff. The hospitality industry workforce contributes £21,600 per employee annually to the industry, compared to £46,000 in retail and £52,000 in manufacturing. The hospitality industry needs to focus their energies and time into the retention of staff to increase productivity and the continuing of losing employees is undermining the industry’s investment in training. Reports show that 21% of employers are reporting skill gaps and the Office of National Statistic (ONS) figures show that 2.7 million people are employed within the hospitality industry in the UK, with 1 million of these being part time jobs and 185,000 being second jobs (Newcombe, T,2013, online). Importance of the StudyThe importance of this research is identifying the factors as to why employees are consistently and effectively leaving the hospitality industry, and would be a benefit to particularly the Human Resource Managers within the Industry.
Secondly with identifying the factors brings the solutions on retaining staff and implementing and developing the resources needed. This section will critically analyze the literature in relation to the research project title, firstly researching employee turnover and employee retention. Then delving into the factors affecting the retaining of staff and examine the main factors which lead to the decision made by staff to leave the industry. One of the main factors in an employee’s decision to leave the industry is that of the turnover culture, which is a variable that has always been suggested in the literature on labour turnover, but has never been tested on a large scale. This comes to a surprise due to the hospitality industry has for a long time been associated with high turnover rates, part – time and casual workers, and an absence of internal labour market e.g.
low job security, career development and promotional opportunity. Turnover culture can have a negative impact on the organisation’s main objectives, especially if these objectives are quality of service and reduced costs to gain competitive advantage. A causal model (an abstract quantitative representation of real-world dynamics), integrating structural, pre-entry, environmental, union and employee orientations, taken from economic, sociological and psychological perspectives. The categorised variables in this model are: Structural variables – relating to work setting, organisational and job-related factors, such as pay, job security, career development, promotional opportunity, work overload, role conflict, co- worker support, supervisory support, role ambiguity, distributive justice, resource inadequacy and routisination. Pre-entry variables – these are hypothesised to have both a positive and negative effect on the job role. Environmental variables – these variables concern the job opportunity, which has been known to have a negative impact on the job satisfaction, leading to a positive effect on the intent of employees deciding to leave their job.
Union variables – whether employees are union members have been found to be a significant predictor of turnover and job satisfaction. Employee orientations – this is dealing with affective responses such as job satisfaction, organisational commitment and job search. These are all produced by the structural, pre-entry, environmental and union variables. Factors causing high employee turnoverAs discussed in the introduction the hospitality industry has one of the highest rates of employee turnover. The factors linked to this high rate of turnover are: Occupational stress – hospitality employees are consistently confronted with extremely stressful and demanding situations, like a situation involving a demanding and insulting customer, when the employee has to deal with the situation by accepting the insult and putting up a smile . This example is often referred to as emotional labour and is associated with high levels of perceived stress, distress and turnover, and the lowers levels of satisfaction in the hospitality industry.
Contributing to the occupational stress is the shift hours, which has a damaging effect on the work – life balance of employees. It is the case for nearly all hospitality staff to work consistently long, arduous hours during other peoples’ leisure time. This creates pressure on hospitality individuals to form social relationships outside of their industry and workplace. More importantly all these factors of pressure and stress are commonly related to hospitality workers seeking affirmation by indulging in extreme forms of behaviour, such as drinking, drugs and gambling, which can lead to life ruining addictions. Occupational stress in the industry has been perceived over the preceding 20 years. In comparison to other industries and occupations.
All the elements discussed in relation to occupational stress, especially where the industry contains elements of an emotional nature can bring a very negative outcome, often referred to as “burnout”. Burnout was researched initially in the so called ‘helping professions’ such as health care professionals and teachers, for the reasons of constant interpersonal interaction. Burnout in the hospitality industry is less researched, therefore less understood, but due to the facts constant interaction with individuals, needing to display conflicting emotions, burn out is now considered a problem in the hospitality industry. Job satisfaction – according to job satisfaction has been shown to be a strong reliable predictor of turnover intentions, as well as lower levels of absenteeism and lateness.
The job satisfaction is reduced quite severely due to the factors discussed such as workload, work-life balance and stress. Research shows that job satisfaction is increased by factors such as job control, autonomy and support from colleagues. Line manager relationships and communication – a report from peoples 1st, shows how the hospitality industry relies heavily on young workers with 34% employees aged under 25 compared to 12% in the economy as a whole. Also predicted is the European working age population is forecast to shrink by 13 million by 2030, meaning the working population may not be big enough to support the economic by as early as 2020. This all relates to a growing problem of career development and the high turnover of employees due to the consistent promoting young people too early, as companies have no choice. Like a domino effect, when retention is low, managers in smaller establishments tend to put the employees straight into “the action”, so to speak, without any formal training.
The establishment may be now fully staffed, but the service is now becoming very questionable. Another relevant issue within recruitment and turnover problems is that of existing employees being moved too early into management or supervisory roles. With communication being a big factor on an employee’s desire to stay or leave an organisation, the problem with individuals being promoted too early leads to bad communication and leadership between managers and subordinates. The unconstructive impacts of poor supervision that is directly causing high turnover of employees needs to be affectively highlighted and managed. Pay & benefits – The hospitality industry has forever been known as an industry that pays its workers less than other industries, but also work longer hours than other industries.
World renowned chef Michel Roux JR came under investigation for his staff being paid lower than the national minimum wage. Employees at le Gavroche Michel Roux JR’s restaurant, chefs were being paid £375 before tax for a 68 hour week, the legal minimum wage should of been for these hours £490 before tax Improving retention in the hospitality industryAs examined within this research project, the hospitality industry has been investigated numerous times in relation to high employee turnover. The purpose of this section is to look at improving the issues related to employees leaving so that the industry can hold onto its employees for longer periods and improving the retention of the hospitality industry as a whole.
In regards to improved pay ; benefits, in the UK there are currently four main types of wage payment systems for manual employers. These are where pay is related to hours at work and not effort, payments by results directed at effort and output, companywide incentive schemes, where pay is linked to overall performance and single status schemes, where manual employers are paid salary. The hospitality needs to implement a generic fair pay system that relates as a whole to performance and results achieved. As stated by effective retention strategy begins at the earliest stage of the recruitment and selection process. Companies must look beyond just the skills required to effectively do the job but also to ensure that an individual fits the organisational culture.
Employing and promoting the right people to establish the management positions in the industry to best help develop and motivate the employees and create job satisfaction within each organisation. Once the hospitality implements professional human resource management strategies across the board, ultimately each factor discussed within the causes of high employee turnover will be eliminated and the employee’s job satisfaction would be increased. Finally, what is most important is the operational stress in the industry reduced, which in essence will happen only if each factor is looked upon and all the corrective actions implemented. This process needs to begin at the very beginning with human resource management; areas in need of urgent attention are that of the work life balance, hours and working conditions of the hospitality employee’s. 3.0 MethodologyAs mentioned in the first two sections, this research project’s focus is on the investigation of the factors that directly impact an employee’s decision to leave the hospitality industry. In addition to this, the research project will give recommendations for the improvement of retention within the industry.
To achieve good research and recommendation objectives, the most suitable method of data collecting must be acquired. This will give the researcher accurate and reliable data to use in the analysis. Research methodology is a process in which information and data is collected for the purpose of collecting informed results, and enables the researcher with access to all the information to be able to answer the research question. Before choosing either a quantitative or a qualitative approach, many considerations need to be reviewed by the researcher. To decide the best and most viable approach a complete review of the research question must be completed, so that the correct approach is adopted.
The primary focus of this section is to outline the research methodology that would be used for this research project, including data collection methods and the underlying reasons of why the discussed methodology would be used. Research philosophy is generally a notion or belief held by a researcher how relevant data should be collected for a particular research project. The two philosophical approaches that a researcher can deploy are epistemology and ontology. Epistemology is the consideration and development of theories about how and why knowledge is made. Epistemology tells us that the ‘knowledge is made’, this is important with research projects because the researcher is in the process of trying to develop new knowledge.
To understand the presence and role of epistemology, the researcher should not take for granted, or just accept the knowledge, questions about how, why and when the knowledge was accepted as valid. However ontology is focused more on establishing the nature of humans and their relations with other aspects of the world. Within research methodologies ontology is split into two terms, ‘realist ontology’ and ‘relativist ontology. Realist ontology sees reality as solid, unquestionable and fixed, meaning to the observer this is seen as an objective stance.
In general, deductivism and positivistic approaches adhere to realist ontologies. Relativist ontology to a degree sees reality as being created by the perception of the observer. In many ways just like being subjective, for example a person’s opinion would be seen as solid fact and belief to the that person, and generally inductivistic and interpretivistic approaches incline towards relativistic ontologies. The researcher should begin the research project with an open outlook, with focus on the most accurate and reliable data. The adopted approach would be that of ontology, this will therefore necessitate the positive notion based on fact.
Positive approach suits better to the collection of the most relevant data, a positivist researcher believes in focus of the quantative research method. This means the main objective is to analyse statistical data from the research subject being observed. The research strategy adopted for this project is survey, associated with the deductive approach; it is mostly used as a large amount of data can be collected from a large population in an economical way. Survey is often used by administrating a questionnaire, which is perceived by people to be easy to explain and understand .
The method can either be quantative or qualitative, quantative is used a numerical data collection, such as questionnaires and data analysis procedures such as graphs. Qualitative is used for data collection techniques such as interviews and data analysis procedure that is non numerical data generated. To gain the most reliable and accurate results, a researcher should use a number of different data collection methods for primary research. The secondary source of this research project is that of in the literature review, which if researching data is less time consuming than for primary research, in which case the researcher will create the questionnaire. The primary research that a researcher would use for this research question would be that of a questionnaire, to gather vital information from the industry employees.
The questionnaire would be designed to ensure the correct questions are delivered to the participants, to be able to achieve a factual conclusion from the data. The questionnaire would be an online questionnaire to access a wider audience, from those currently and previously have worked within the hospitality industry. Types of samples are that of probability sampling and non- profitability sampling. Probability sampling is a type of random sampling from the population, an example of this illustratively would be picking names random from a hat. Non-profitability sampling means that you are choosing a sample of an industry or unit you have access to, as an example for this research proposal a non-profitability sample would be used to access past hospitality industry employees, and would use several techniques to obtain these samples including convenience sampling and snowball sampling. As seen in Appendix 1, the questionnaire is set with carefully selected multiple choice questions. There are many positives and negatives of using a questionnaire to gather data, one positive is that it is definitely cost effective, being able with one questionnaire design gather vast amounts of data to a large audience with minimal effort.
One negative of a questionnaire is there is no way to determine whether the answers received are genuinely true or false, as well as questionnaires are deemed to not be taken very seriously generically across the globe Ethical ConsiderationAdhering to ethics when promoting research is vitally important to only produce true knowledge and will minimize falsifying and misinterpreting evidence. Since research involves a great deal of cooperation with people from many different disciplines and institutions, ethical standards promote the values such as trust, accountability, fairness and mutual respect. This research project will put in place all measures to promote ethical behaviour throughout every task and chapter. The researcher would ensure that there would be no bias during the selection of participants for the questionnaire, and secondly all participants will be protected thoroughly with their privacy upheld throughout the whole research project. Lastly within the questionnaire there is no requirement for participants to disclose any personal information.
ProposalWestminster Kingsway College in association with London Southbank University Proposal 2017-18 Name: Ashley Gilham Course:Fdsc Culinary Arts DR yr 2 Investigating factors which directly impact employee’s individual decision, to leave employment within the hospitality industry.The overall aim of the project The research study will focus on four main objectives. These objectives provide vital and conclusive information, presenting a clear picture of why employees decide to leave the hospitality industry. To seek and share the factors that contribute highly towards high retention rates within the hospitality industry. To create a questionnaire for hospitality industry employees, then the objective will be to relate the findings from the survey to the hospitality industry in general. Compare secondary research finding to the primary research survey findings and discuss what factors are directly connected to the research question Identify some of the effective methods of retention and recommend the methods to be used in the industry to ultimately improve retention rates and employee job satisfaction.
Strongly disagree Job challenged me Workload was manageable Your skills were effectively used throughout Sufficient resources were available Your co- worker and line manager valued your input There was opportunity for career development Training and development programs were made available. Strongly disagree Wages were paid on time Work life balance was promoted and practiced in the company Range of benefits and bonuses were available The pay was adequate in relation to the role. The work induction helped me The working environment was positive There was adequate equipment to do the job I have a good relationship with other employees within the company There was sufficient staff to cover the work 6.
Had sufficient knowledge of the job Acknowledged all employees contribution Provided constructive feedback regularly Maintained a professional relationship with employees Recognized and Acknowledged achievements 7. What would you say you most liked about working with the Company? 8. What was the reason that you chose this company to work for What did you like least about working with the Company? Would any of the following of made you stay with the Company More work/life balance Career progression/development Better training given Increase in pay Improved benefits package Other (please specify)
