Chapter 8
Do
What can you do to more fully
engage your employees?
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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?
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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?
1) 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.
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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
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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.
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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.
1) 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 activitybased 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.
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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?
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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
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The channels you have in place to communicate
formally with your employees as a unit.
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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't
affect 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 compensation
issue 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?
The Who
The How
The What
Achieved
Improved
your
employees
Increased
commitment
Engaging
generates
,
leads
competence
to
and motivati
productivity, contributes
efficiency
and quality
on
Employees
excellence,
tod
greater
customer
satisfaction,
increased
profitability
Processes
Results