Imperial Hotel London: Back-of-House Staffing Efficiency Report

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Introduction to Management
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Table of Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................3
Analysis of the individual problem –Summarise and interpret the data from your secondary
research into published literature and management theory. Describe and present your results for
effective management of the problem. A summary and justification of key proposals for the
resolution of the problem in the organisation..................................................................................4
Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................9
References......................................................................................................................................10
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Introduction
The Imperial Hotel, London is a branch of Imperial Hotels London. Renowned multinational
hotel chain, Star Hotels manage and own this hotel. This organisation boasts of a rich name and
consists of almost 500 bedrooms (Imperial Hotels. 2019). The hotel is situated on the sides of
Russell Square. The organisation has faced major problems in business over the recent years in
different sectors of management, namely employment, work culture, technologies, and
development of the employees. In addition, the company has failed to deliver proper customer
satisfaction, and faced challenges in the front end and back end staffing department.
This report will focus on approaches that will help the Imperial Hotels to overcome these
challenges successfully. A firm analysis of the causes of the problems faced by the company on
the management of back end staffing will be provided. In addition, the management and
operational perspective of this specific problem in relation to all the other difficulties faced by
the hotel will be provided. The report will also provide a 3-point plan, which will provide
solutions for these challenges and help to improve the quality of service, morale of the staff,
efficiency in operations and production rate of the hotel. A supportive relation of the solutions
with the theories of the management and operations will also be established.
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Problem 5
Analysis of the individual problem –Summarise and interpret the data from your
secondary research into published literature and management theory. Describe and
present your results for effective management of the problem. A summary and justification
of key proposals for the resolution of the problem in the organisation.
Discuss the problem’s likely causes from a management and operational perspective
including any relationships with the other 4 problems.
The Imperial Hotel currently faces a major problem in the back house-staffing department. The
organisation’s major challenges have been the allocation of services to the 400-500 rooms in the
hotel. This problem has occurred due to the lack of planning and prioritizing by the operation
management of the company. The inefficiency in decision-making is very critical for any
organisation, and the same problem is being faced by this organisation. Proper operational
management is necessary for the proper working of all the departments in the organisation. The
role of the operation management is to identify the skills and the abilities of all the individuals in
the sector and direct these skills in proper directions, which can bring maximum success to the
organisation (Chang, 2016).
The hotel management have also received complaints due to lack of cleanliness in the rooms.
The main reason for this is the inefficiency of the management in the maintenance of the
services. In addition, the failure of operation management to allot proper staffs in the
maintenance sector has reduced the quality of the services, leading to customer’s agitation.
Maintenance of resources and individuals in the organisation is the key role of the operation and
management. Proper functioning of this role will lead to high quality of services and further
satisfy the customers. In addition, the hotel failed to conduct proper surveys for customer
feedbacks. The feedback system is one of the most important features of the management sector.
This helps the organisation to understand the quality of their services and also the scopes and
regions where it can improve. Moreover, the behaviour of the attendants has also been
questionable (Sherif, 2015). This happened mainly due to the lack of motivation of the workers
and staffs employed in the organisation. The management and operation sector is to be held
responsible for the following reasons. The management department should be responsible for the
increase in motivation and intent. The management should aim at increasing the practice of high
benefits and incentives for employees based on the quality of their works.
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The company have collaborated with the ABC (International) to recruit at least 30 to 50
employees for the back end jobs in the hotel. This recruiting company mainly employs individual
from Spain, the recruitment procedures are tough, and the candidates are interviewed and
properly assessed before their selection. However, the local employees fail to match the abilities
and skill set of this new employees recruited by ABC (International). The company to generate a
score based on the performance of the employees uses the Texon system. Generally the
employees from Spain score more than the home-staffs. Furthermore, the employees from Spain
fail to cooperate with the home staffs. This leads to termination of the maximum number of
home staffs from the organisation. The main problem faced by the organisation is that the cost of
recruiting the employees from Spain is high in comparison to the recruitment of the home staffs.
This directly affects the employee turnover rate in the organisation and the company fails to
achieve more profits (Lozano, 2015).
Further, this problem can be linked to all the other four problems that are faced by the
organisation currently. The poor quality of back staffing has led to reduction of the quality of the
services and rooms. In many occasion, the guests have faced unacceptable behaviours from the
staffs and also their inability to manage the visitors and allot them rooms have increased. This
has led to low satisfaction of the guests. In addition, there have complains about the staffs at the
reception for not providing appropriate help to the customers. The poor management of the back
end staffs have led to increase in the yearly turnover of the staffs. Employees tend to have low
work satisfaction and no motivation for working. The toxic work culture of the organisation also
has a negative impact on the employees, which leads to degradation in their performances and
quality of their work (Wirtz, 2016). The problems faced by the front house staffs directly relate
to the performance of the back end employees. The receptions of the organisation have been
subjected to severe failure in the use of technology for the allotment of rooms and delivery of
different services. The work of the back end staffs are directed to the information provided by
the front house staffs. These two teams recently had major conflicts regarding the information of
the guests and their demands. This further degrades the work environment and leads to poor
quality of resources in the hotel (Heizer, 2016).
Put forward a 3 point plan for resolving the problem particularly in terms of improving the
quality of service, staff morale, operational efficiency and productivity to make the hotel
financially sustainable.
The problems that are faced by The Imperial Hotel can be resolved by a three-direction plan.
This will help the hotel to overcome its challenges and achieve a higher status in the Star Hotels.
The produced plan will have three dimensions in itself that will help the organisation to improve
its quality of services, the moral of the staffs and employees, operational and productive
efficiency. The plan includes activities like improvement in technologies and IT systems in the
organisation with the software like PMS (Performance Management System), increase in the
incentive and benefit systems, generating proper feedbacks and surveys, ensuring high quality
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recruitment, selection, and training of the staffs, and proper job allocation of the employees in
the organisation (Chang, 2015).
The front house staffs have faced big problems in the allotment of the data properly based on the
demands of the guests. These problems have occurred due to the inefficient technological
framework used by the management of the organisation. The company use systems like Micros
Fidelio reservation and Property Management System, which provides up-to-date data about the
guests. However, these systems have been highly inconsistent in the recent times and do not
provide proper data. The Performance Management System will provide real time information
and is the appropriate system that can be used by the hotel. The proper allotment of the work to
the back end staffs will enable them to provide proper services according to the demands of the
guests. There will be fewer complaints, which will increase the morale of the employees and lead
to a healthy environment in the working area. The house keeping staffs have also faced problems
in collaborating with the staffs from the Spain. The work efficiency of the local housekeeping
staffs has been generally of low quality due to the problem of work allocation. They often fail to
address the demands of the guests due to this reason. The following problem can be resolved
with the help of the new technology management system that is Performance Management
system.
The organisation has faced a degrading quality of the performance of the employees and staffs
over the recent times. This has been done due to the low morale and the toxic work culture in the
organisation. The behaviours of the supervisors have often been aggressive and the management
styles have ineffective. To resolve these issues, the organisation must target at proper methods to
increase the morale of the employees. The organisation must introduce different benefits and
incentive plans to increase the morale and the performance of the employees. The organisation
currently provides rewards like Employee of the month of the whole organisation, employee of
the month for each department, staff rewards based on their performance for an interval of 3
months, and departmental vouchers. However, these reward systems have not been beneficial in
the organisations. The company must introduce new benefits like Medical insurances, Disability
insurance, Life insurance, Retirement benefits, Fringe benefits, and Paid time off. These will
provide the satisfaction to the employees and increase their motivational level. In addition, the
company have followed authoritarian style of management and dictatorial leadership, which has
expanded the gap of the senior authorities with the employees (Efferin, 2015). The organisation
should target at implementing the democratic style leadership in the organisation. The
management needs to organize proper meetings for decisions regarding the functions of the
organisations.
The Imperial Hotels have faced a lot of criticism over the recent years due to customer
dissatisfaction. One way that will help the organisation to develop and improve its facilities is by
conducting proper surveys and feedbacks both internally and externally. The management team
of the organisation should conduct the internal surveys, which is achieving feedbacks from their
customers and guests. This will help the management to identify the sectors they need to
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improve. Feedback tools like Clarabridge and Qualtrics can be influential for the company, as
these tools provide features like text analytics, linguistic categorisation, sentiment analysis, and
emotion detection. In addition, the management should also conduct external surveys of the other
hotels in the region. This help to understand their competitions and achieve a superior status
among the Star Hotels.
The Imperial Hotel has struggled with the employee turnover over the recent years. The
employees tend not to stay in this organisation for more than a year. In addition, the ABC
(International) has been recruiting 30-50 better-trained employees from the Spain. The lack of
proper training and lecture sessions has led to less improvement of the employees in the hotel.
The management must ensure that proper candidates are recruited for the company. To ensure
this, the management must use different approaches like talent pools and recruitment marketing
(Nabi, 2014). In addition, the candidates and employees should be provided with proper training
with the help of lectures, on-job trainings, coaching, mentoring, role-playing, and management
games (Greiner, 2015). This will help the local staffs in the back end division to compete equally
with the employees from Spain.
Figure 1: Recruitment procedure with the help of Recruitment Marketing.
(Source: Gunn, 2015)
Support your answer with management and operations theories and principles
The above section provides different approaches that can be followed by The Imperial Hotels to
regain its status as a leading four-star hotel in the chain of Star Hotels. The solutions provided
can be highly beneficial for the organisation as it aligns with the principles and theories of the
management and operations. The management theories of contingency management provide
information about the efficient management of the individuals in an organization (Rosenberg
Hansen, 2017). Approaches like improvement in technology, the size of the organisation, and
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style of leadership in an organisation are the key aspects of these theories. The above
recommendations for The Imperial Hotels satisfy these factors. In general, to achieve success the
organisation must follow the democratic style of leadership that will help to improve the
relations between the higher-level authorities and the basic employees and workers. The
requirement in improvement of technology has also been addressed in the above part. The
organisation should use technological frameworks like Performance Management Systems to
increase the efficiency in different functions in the organisation (Al Ariss, 2014).
Moreover, the operation management theories aim at ensuring efficient operations in an
organisation, so that the organisation is able to meet the demands of the customers by using the
minimum amount of the resources. These resources include raw materials, labour, people skills,
creativity, and energy. Operational theory like business process redesign, target at modifying the
business structure of the organisation to ensure maximum profits. This theory aims at analyzing
and developing the business structure to improve the workflow in the organisation. This theory is
satisfied in the above section. The techniques to reduce the employee turnover are provided. This
can benefit the hotel to obtain more amounts of profits. In addition, the focus has been laid on the
regular training of the new and old employees. Training procedures as role-playing, management
games, on-job training, and coaching have been suggested (Slack, 2018).
Figure 2: Business Process Re-engineering
(Source: Sikdar, 2014)
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Conclusion
The above report provides solutions and approaches that The Imperial Hotels can use to
overcome their inefficiency in the functions and operation in the back of house staffing. The
report provides an analysis of the causes of the problems and identifies their relations with the
other specified issues of the company. Moreover, the techniques to reduce their inefficiency in
management and operations have been provided. In addition, the report discussed about the
implementation of the operation and management theories in the specified solutions.
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References
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Rosenberg Hansen, J. and Ferlie, E., 2016. Applying strategic management theories in public
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