Chapter 8 Do What can you do to more fully engage your employees?

Chapter 8DoWhat can you do to more fully engage your employees?

object • Understanding how does effective leadership help • Understand how to impact the culture in your hotel • To know how can you manage the composition of your team • To know how can you provide clarity for your employees • Understanding how to build the competence of your employees • What can you do to increase cooperation between employees • Understand how to make work more challenging • To address the compensation issue to raise engagement levels • How to manage change to increase engagement

your first priority should be to incorporate your aspirations about employees into your mission

1. How does effective leadership help? • It is worth highlighting the relationship between levels of engagement and leadership styles. • You will quickly notice that individuals and indeed teams can shift between different levels of engagement in terms of their level of contribution to your business: disengaged, somewhat engaged and truly engaged.

There is a direct linkage between the quality of leadership and the levels of engagement of your employees, but in turn, their levels of engagement can determine the style of leadership needed. Where an individual, or employees as a unit, are disengaged the steering style is needed because you have to drive performance. When people are truly engaged, the facilitating style works best because you know that they will do the work to a high standard.

2. How can you impact the culture in your hotel? • Strategy and culture must always be in alignment. • Nobody can determine what culture is best in your hotel. However, it should be cleat that there are obvious pitfalls to avoid, such as creating a ‘top-down’ culture or one where employees feel undervalued. • You can consider this issue by reflecting on our three dimensions of work; the what, the how and the who.

The results from these reflections will lead to one of two conclusions; either you will find that there is a positive culture which supports employee engagement and is helping you move towards your goals, or you may realize that it isn’t as you would like. • If it does match your expectations, give yourself a pat on the back and spend time thinking about how that was achieved. If your culture isn’t as you would wish, then you need to be clear about where the gaps lie and why they are there. • You should also recognize that cultural change in any business of any size is far from easy and will not be achieved in the short term.

☞ Practical Steps Towards Changing the Culture of your Hotel • If you haven’t developed your vision and mission, then that’s the first thing you should do, based on the lessons learned earlier. • If you already have your vision and mission, do they accurately describe the culture and values you want? • No matter where you are with regard to your vision and mission, always involve your employees in the design/redefinition process; consult with them, get their ideas and opinion.

Launch or re-launch your vision and mission to your primary stakeholders. • Always be a role model for the culture you are trying to create in the hotel and, in particular, apply the leadership principles we have identified. • Review all training programs which you may have at the hotel

3. How can you manage the composition of your team? • One of the most important areas where you can influence employee engagement is when you recruit new team members. You need to, as far as is possible, employ individuals who match the culture of your hotel and have the greatest potential to engage. • Do you have a structured approach to recruitment and selection? • Are there defined roles and responsibilities to underpin the process, with appropriate support tools in place?

Are those who are involved in recruiting employees competent at it? Is your current approach to recruitment and selection generating the right type of employees for you, or are you having problems finding people who match your needs? Do you find that a significant number of the people you employ don’t live up to your expectations? How many employees start working for you and then leave after a short period of time? When you look at the employees you have, do they make you proud or drive you to despair? Is diversity embraced and managed at the hotel?

What do you want employees to do? Knowing what it is you want your employees to do is a fairly basic requirement and most hotels now have defined job descriptions in place for every position in the hotel. They can be used in training and development to help identify individual training needs, so they are vital tools. One of the benefits of preparing or reviewing your job descriptions is that it makes you think about how the work is structured and organized at the hotel and as part of that you can often identify better ways of doing things in terms of job design.

2) What type of employees are you seeking? You can generally find out what a candidate can do by analyzing their CV or by looking at the past jobs they have held. When you compare that to the job description you can get a fair idea as to whether they are right, in a competence sense, for a particular job. You may not find the ideal but you measure all candidates against that profile and select the individual who most closely matches it. An employee profile essentially identifies the characteristics of the person you want to fill a particular position.

Although it depends on the job you are recruiting for, in developing a profile of the ideal candidate, our three dimensions of work can again be a useful way of highlighting what a profile consists of.

an interview is supposed to help you determine if a candidate is the ‘right’ person for the job, but you can never do so unless you clarify what ‘right’ actually means. In particular, you need to be very clear about the who part of the profile and clearly define the attributes you are ideally seeking. By having employee profiles, you can then devise a series of questions to draw out whether the candidate matches the profile and use these as park of your interview plan.

Give me some examples of where you felt you made a positive contribution to your team in the past? • What do you think your previous team mates would say about working with you? • What can you bring to our team that would set you apart from other candidates? ☞ Developing and using well structured question, based on the employee profile.

3) How do you select them? Predominately, interviews remain the main selection tool used in hotel, but there are a range of options available such as psychometric tests and assessment centers which can be used in conjunction with the interview to really test suitability against the employee profile. If you have access to such tools then uses them widely, particularly for recruiting leaders, as they improve the effectiveness of the selection process.

The golden rules of interviewing • Nobody should interview candidates for jobs at your hotel, without first having had training in that area. • Use your job descriptions and employee profiles to screen CVs and only call the most suitable candidates for interview. • Ensure that you prepare for interviews in advance. • Don’t interview in public areas. • Interviews should always follow a plan. • Don’t make your judgment too early. • Use effective question techniques. • Ensure that you follow the same question plan for all candidates. • The majority of your questions should seek to draw out, or to probe who the candidate is, not only what they can do. • Two interviews are always better than one. • Don’t interview too many candidates on the same day. • Use a common rating scale.

4. How can you provide clarity for your employees? To engage employees to any level, you need to provide clarity for them about the hotel, their role and your expectations from them. For existing employees, you should communicate your vision and mission to them and provide regular updates on how the business is doing. When new employees join, you provide clarity for them by offering a comprehensive induction.

At a basic level, there are obviously legal requirements which must be complied with when a new employee starts, such as issuing contracts and informing them providing them with clarity about the hotel and their role in it. To do this, all new employees should receive an induction which includes the following. • An introduction to your hotel, your vision and mission and the broader picture of what you are about. • An explanation of what your expectations are of them in terms of their attitudes, behaviors and commitment to the hotel. • An introduction to their department.

5. How can you build the competence of your employees? Building employee competence contributes to engagement because it ensures that all employees are capable of doing their work to an equally high standard. Development, on the other hand, has a longer-term view than training because it is concerned with helping individuals to grow beyond the current requirements of their job. Everybody must be trained, but not all employees want or indeed are suitable for development and that’s why we make the distinction.

Make training work for you at the hotel You can only improve the competence of your employees if you offer regular, structured and effective training at the hotel which is at all times based on identified needs. Training begins for an employee during their induction, but it shouldn’t stop there. Continuous training, both on and off the job is a feature of all excellent companies. See belows: on-the-job training, on-the-job training, maximising training effectiveness.

(1) On-the-job training On-the-job training tends to be skills based and is aimed at helping an employee to do their job to the standard required. you must find ways to ensure that logistical problems with on-the-job training are overcome. The only way to address the on-the-job training issue effectively is to make it mandatory requirement for all leaders that they fulfill their obligations regarding whatever training system you adopt at the hotel. You should ensure that whatever competence model you develop for your business defines leadership obligations regarding training.

(2) Off-the-job training Employees should also be provided with off-the-job training opportunities focusing on issues such as hygiene, health and safety, fire, first-aid and, of course, customer care. This type of training also makes a hidden contribution to teambuilding when you bring employees from different departments together for training programs. At a management level, opportunities should be continuously provided for managers to develop their skills, particularly those related to whatever leadership competence model you agree.

(3) Maximizing training effectiveness • The key to maximizing training effectiveness is to ensure that it continuously responds to defined needs. These might be identified through customer feedback, performance appraisals and indeed by direct requests from the employees themselves. • Nothing will disengage employees more than having to sit through badly delivered training courses.

2) Develop engaged employees Development is particularly geared towards employees who are fully engaged with your business. - in fact the best development often happens without any formal structures in place. Preventing engaged employees from developing will lead to resentment and, in any case, the better ones will move on in search of the opportunities they seek.

6. What can you do to increase cooperation between employees? People like to work with those they are closer to – which are essentially teams within teams. To break down the barriers which often build up between departments in hotels, it can also be helpful to allow people from one department to work in another for a short period, even just for part of a day. Another area where you can maximize the potential for cooperation and build engagement in the process is to use team-based approaches to problem solving.

Finally in this area, don’t forget the importance of the social aspect of work life and the contribution this can make to enhanced cooperation. The main point to note here is that events should involve more than a trip to the pub. There is nothing wrong with that, but activity-based outings have a greater potential for teambuilding.

7. How can you address the control issue? • To support the engagement effort, you and every leader at the hotel should be seen to maintain control on an ongoing basis; persistent underperformance should never be tolerated. • After all, that is why you have a disciplinary procedure.

1) The importance of feedback As part of controlling performance, individual feedback is naturally vital and this should have both informal and formal components. Individual appraisals are hugely important and highly effective in terms of building engagement, but only if they are will delivered. Appraisals also need to be planned in advance, with the employee provided with an opportunity to rate their own performance.

What, how, and who For an engaged employee, an appraisal offers an opportunity to receive recognition for their performance and can also allow you to identify ways in which you can further build that engagement. For those who are not engaged, they help you to determine why this is so, or at the very least to identify areas where they must improve.

2) The need for empowerment As well as maintaining control, you need to consider how you can release it as you seek to enhance engagement levels; employees need to feel empowered in their jobs. Empowerment in a true sense is really about involving employees in decision making, particularly where those decisions directly affect them.

8. What can you do to improve communication at the hotel? • Apart from the informal communication that happens every day in the business, you need to pay a lot of attention to the structural component of communication • The channels you have in place to communicate formally with your employees as a unit. • The channels you use will depend upon the size of your hotel but the suggestions here can tailored to your need.

1) Briefings Briefings are a great tool for daily communication and every shift in every department should begin with one Briefing are designed to provide clarity as to what will happen on a given shift and for that reason alone they are beneficial because they focus on the job at hand. By bringing everyone together for a few minutes each day, briefings allow team moral and dynamic to be gauged by the leader, simply by reading the collective mood.

2) Meetings On a monthly basis These meetings should have a set agenda so that a similar format applies for all departments and cover points such as: : a review of department performance during the month : feedback from customers over the month : self-assessment of service quality and ideas/suggestions for service improvement : department-related matters Holding these meetings is one thing, but if they are to have any real impact, they need to be well managed.

3) Non-verbal communication channels As well as verbal communication, there are a number of non-verbal mechanisms to consider. This is often symbolic as to what’s happening at the hotel generally in relation to employee engagement. Internal emails have also become a feature of businesses today and naturally this facilitates transfer of information but there is no substitute for effective face-to-face communication.

9. How can you make work more challenging? You should continuously explore ways in which your employees can be more challenged and this particularly applies to those who are already motivated and engaged. For some this can mean having important tasks delegated to them, for others it might involve training them to work in other areas of the hotel. For everyone it should mean that they take a more proactive role in overall improvement efforts at the hotel through their participation in departmental meetings or by active involvement in cross-functional teams.

1) Involving employees in improvement initiatives Finding better ways of doing things at work should be an inclusive process and creates an ideal opportunity to challenge your employees. One simple approach to this can be to develop a suggestions scheme, whereby employees can propose ideas or solutions at work. Encouraging employees to make suggestions and then, when they come up with something of value, recognizing their contribution and allowing them to be involved in implementing their idea can give a real sense of challenge to work for the majority of employees.

2) Consider multi-skilling/job rotation For some employees, the opportunity to develop their skills or to work in other areas of the hotel can help add challenge to their working life, whilst at the same time enhancing their skills sets. Having multi-skilled employees is also of course beneficial for you, as it gives you more flexibility when it comes to rostering.

3) Develop community links Developing links with your local community and working closely with charities, schools and associations can be a way of creating a sense of challenge for employees. Consider asking your employees for their opinions as to what they would be willing to do to support the local community and you might be surprised about the positive response you get.

10. How can you ensure that conflict doesn'taffect engagement? Destructive conflict can have far reaching consequences on overall engagement levels if it is not dealt with effectively, so you must pay particular attention to it. When you see destructive conflict happening between employees, you must make it clear to those involved that you are aware of what is going on and are not prepared to accept it. If you can’t figure out what’s causing it, or if your attempts at resolving the issue fail, then you move to imposing a solution

In general, with regard to conflict, you need to: constantly monitor the climate amongst your employees make sure you do not inhibit constructive conflict, but do control it address destructive conflict as soon as you identify it and do not allow such situations to fester play a mediation-type role first, failing that you must impose the solution you expect and monitor compliance with it.

11. How can you address the compensationissue to raise engagement levels? The key issue here is productivity. The precise amount that you are paying people is less important than what you are getting in return. Performance-related pay has grown in importance in our industry and you should explore how you might apply it in your hotel, or extend your current approach if it’s already a feature. As an alternative approach, consider how you can more widely apply team-based incentives, as they have the benefit of recognizing global rather than solely individual performance.

1) Recognize and reward high performance • Beyond the pay and conditions issues, you should also examine how people are recognized and rewarded when they do perform to a high standard. • Make sure that you: • define specific criteria upon which the award is to be based. • agree how the decision will be made, who will be involved in selecting the winner against the criteria • identify how the winner will be recognized and whether there be an overall winner each year from those who won the monthly or quarterly award • make the award attractive

☞ In addition to the above options for recognizing and rewarding employees, don’t forget to promote any potential benefits to employees where it is within your capability to offer them.

12. How can you manage change to increase engagement? Define a structured framework for handling change in the business and apply it to all major change initiatives at the hotel. Change must be seen to lead to tangible benefits. Reactions to change vary, but most people fear it to some degree and the bigger that change the more people can worry about it.

In general terms, the more involvement your employees feel they have in determining the nature and direction of changes affecting them. When you do make significant changes, you should set a timeframe for implementation and stick to it, as open-ended change can be disheartening. In any change process, show benefits as early as possible so that your employees see the value of it. When the change materializes, recognize the efforts of employees in making it happen.

How can you manage change to increase engagement?

Chapter 8 Do What can you do to more fully engage your employees?