Engagement of casual labor to Hotel Arts' standards and culture

Abstract

In the context of hospitality organizations, brand attributes origins in service delivery and other intangibles within the organization (Lashley, 1995). Engaged and committed employees who understand and accept brand attributes can become brand evangelists and deliver on the brand promise in a consistent and a better manner across global hospitality portfolios. Employee engagement has become a widely used and popular term. This construct is a relatively new notion in the literature, but it has been heavily promoted by HR consulting companies that offer advice on how to create and leverage it. The general consensus is that the fundamental concept of engagement may explain behavior at work, but inconsistent interpretations still exist. According to Gibbons (2006:5) “employee engagement is a heightened emotional and intellectual connection that an employee has for his/her job, organization, manager, or co-workers that in turn influences him/her to apply additional discretionary effort to his/her work”. Hotel Arts is also affected by employee turnover. The problem is encountered in the banqueting department of the hotel. Hotel Arts organizes a lot of banqueting events, both offside and in the hotel, for which it regularly needs so-called casual or external labor. These employees work at an event for one time, maybe twice. As a consequence, the hotel reaches the problem of very high turnover in this department. The issue that arises is how this external labor could adapt more to the hotel’s standards and culture in order to get more engaged with the company’s service values and thereby reducing the level of turnover.

Within the framework of this Master Thesis a qualitative research has been chosen. The goal of the interviews is to discover the different views on the current situation regarding the engagement of the ETT to the hotel’s culture, in order to determine which aspects of the work and the engagement of the ETT can be improved through policy measures. I decided to develop three different measures, based on selection and recruitment, training, and the improvement of the workplace. I found it essential to research about the main causes of these three problems encountered, and to provide a strategy that could bring a solution to each of them. "