Influences of Labour Characteristics on the Management of Human Resources in the Hospitality Industry

Table of Contents
Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 3 The Labour Characteristics of Hospitality Industry ....................................................................................... 3 Volume of Employment ............................................................................................................................ 3 Nature of Job............................................................................................................................................. 4 Diversity of the Workforce........................................................................................................................ 4 Changes in Training and Development ..................................................................................................... 5 Work Quality and Work timings................................................................................................................ 5 Women in the industry ............................................................................................................................. 6 Issue of the Migrant and Contingent Workforce ...................................................................................... 6 Effect of the use of contingent workers in the hospitality organization .................................................. 7 Service Setting of the Hospitality Industry.................................................................................................... 8 Skill Set of Employees ............................................................................................................................... 8 Training and Development of the employees .......................................................................................... 8 Recruitment and Selection........................................................................................................................ 9 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................................... 9 References .................................................................................................................................................. 10

Introduction
The labour characteristics define the way the organization works and operates in this industry. The service setting of the industry is an indicative measure on the level of the involvement of the human resource to the nature of working of the industry. For example, the service setting of the production and manufacturing industry has less human to human interaction and only sales and marketing aspect of the industry handles the end customer. For rest of the division, however, end customer interaction is nil or rare at the maximum. For a service industry, especially with respect to the hospitality industry, nearly all the employees, whether the front desk receptionist or the service oriented porter meets the end customer at one point of time. Thus this setting would necessitate a greater involvement of the human resources and the higher amount of the training of the same (Illmakunnas & Maliranta, 2005). With this point in view, our paper would look at the different practices of the Human Resource Department changes with the type of service the hospitality industry is offering with the examples to show the same. Similarly, this paper would also take a look at the different aspects that are concerned with the labour characteristics that are associated with the hospitality industry and then would perform a comparative analysis with the labour characteristics of other industries.

The Labour Characteristics of Hospitality Industry

Here we will deal discuss the Labour characteristics of the hospitality industry, which will look at certain aspects with relation to the labour force of the hospitality industry. Side by side, we shall compare the same aspects to the other industries. These aspects are Volume of Employment, Nature of job, Diversity of work force, etc. Volume of Employment- The hospitality is one of the most labour intensive industries in the world. This can be attributed by the fact that the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC)

have shown that hospitality industry provides livelihood for 230 million people, or 8.7 per cent of the total number of jobs in the world (Wood, 1997). There is an upward trend year after year, and this sector has shown that it has continually increased the number of jobs available to people. Compared to this, the manufacturing sector has shown that the number of people who are employed have been falling year on year due to increasing automization and mechanization that is removing the need of the work force. Nature of Job- One of the biggest issues with the respect of the workforce is that the vast majority of the jobs in the hospitality sector are the low paying, low prestige, poor future and less benefits to the people. These jobs by various scientists and scholars have been called as The McJob, a phrase coined by Douglas Coupland (Coupland, 1993). A study of MacDonald & Sirianni (1996) have shown that the hospitality industry has been characterised by a large majority of the low skill, low pay job of the porter or the receptionist or the bell boy, or a smaller number of the high profile, high paying jobs such as the top chef, or the manager of the hotel, etc. The result is that there are very less talented and skilled people in the hospitality industry. The task in hand is to determine a middle ground, where good and talented human resource can be kept by giving them moderate paying challenging job roles. The nature of job for another service industry, like Banking is that there are a vast majority of the intermediate jobs that requires a certain thought process. Diversity of the Workforce- Like any other multinational company the diversity of a global hospitality brand will be immense. But there is a major difference to this labour characteristic compared to the other industries. This is the aspect for the employment of the locals into the industry. As we have already established the nature of the job to be non challenging and low paying for the majority, the main challenge to the human resource management of a hospitality

company (Parotta et al, 2012). Thus a larger percentage of the host country workforce have to be employed, so that there is a higher sense of compatibility to the domestic customers and the hospitality company can also give a sense of local feeling to the international guests with the help of local manpower. Changes in Training and Development- We have already established two important things- one is that the quality of the major population of the human resource is average or sub par due to the low pay and low challenge of the job, the second thing is that a majority of the local population of the place is employed with the hospitality industry. These two things throws up a very difficult challenge- this is the training and development of the work force. There are two main differences of the training and development of hospitality industry and a traditional production industry. One is that the hospitality industry deals with the service of people, while the production industry deals with the manufacture of a product (Amrithraj et al, 2011). There is only one way of the manufacture of the product in a product line, but there are numerous ways of servicing to the people in different ways and techniques. The second is that manufacture encompasses a lot of theoretical underpinnings that can be taught in class, whereas all the aspects of the service industry has to be done on job in situ. These two differences compounded with the low skill set of the human resource is a big challenge that the hospitality industry has to overcome and the need of the hour is to have a robust training and development program. Work Quality and Work timings- Work quality is one of the most important aspect of any industry. Even though we have claimed that the work quality of the majority of the workforce leaves a lot to be desired, there are certain advantages of the working as compared to the other industries. These advantages include, low changes of work related accidents and low levels of fatigue on the job. However there is one major characteristic of the labour force in the hospitality

industry, which is the uneven work timing of the workforce. The hospitality industry works round the clock to cater to the people who want to avail its services, even in the middle of the night (Ebighgbo, 2011). Thus there is a requirement of round the clock availability of the work force that may lead to the long and uneven working hours to the staff 24 x 7. There are also many incidences of stress at the work place due to the above reason. Women in the industry- One very encouraging aspect of the hospitality industry is that women are very valuable in all forms and all levels of the hospitality industry due to the affinity of the industry to centre around the strong points of the women- sharing, caring and the well being of the others. We thus find a higher percentage of women being employed in the hospitality industry compared to any other industry. The above point of the long and unpredictable working hours may put of some women employees as they may not be comfortable working in the odd hours. Issue of the Migrant and Contingent Workforce- All the firms and companies exist to make money and they view the human resource of the company as the cost centre, where each employee erodes the profit margin of the company. Thus every company would like to these the optimal strength of the workforce that maximises utility for a given cost. As the numbers of employees start showing the decreasing returns to scale, the management decides to cut down the workforce. This is one major problem seen with the hospitality industry. There are a lot of migrant and contingent workers. The requirement of the contingent workers is due to the inherent service characteristic of the firm, which is more seasonal in nature, which is during the spring and winter breaks where people go travelling and make use of the hospitality services. Contingent workers are hired by the companies for certain specific needs and are provided by staffing agencies. The regular workers also called employees of the company are employed

directly by the company for performing regular jobs in the company. The article of Hipple S and Stewart J gives out several reasons as to why contingent workers earn less compared to noncontingent or regular employee. The reasons put forth by the article are that most of the contingent workers work part time and hence they are paid less. Even if they are employed for full time, the working hours of the contingent workers are 10% less than regular workers. Secondly, the contingent workers tend to be younger, less trained/lower education and hence less paid. The disparity in wages is the least in the cases where skilled workers are employed under contingency. The contingent workers remain less trained when compared to the non-contingent category for the simple reason that the companies would not like to invest in training to contingent workers since these workers are hired temporarily and based on the previous knowledge. Thus the contingent & migrant force remains less trained when compared to the noncontingent employees and this result in lesser wages to the contingent. Since the category and circumstances under which the companies hire contingent workers are different from the regular employees, companies can maintain the sense of internal equity in spite of disparity in wages and rewards. Effect of the use of contingent workers in the hospitality organization- If a company employs contingent workers just to cut labour costs and benefits, it affects negatively on the regular workers. For example, employing more and more contingent workers may strain co-worker relations. This may damage the fabric and bottom line of the organisation. The detrimental effects may prove to be costlier than cost saving. A study has shown that firms with higher level of contingent work force were less productive and resulted in lesser profits (Kalleberg, 2000). The study has also put forth that increasing number of contingent workers increased hostilities and tensions possibly because of poor attitudes of contingent workers. This will negatively

impact the companys competitive position. However, functional use of the contingent workers by a company will have positive outcome to the company. For example, employing skilled workers or use contingent workers in the areas of high importance, will have higher performance level.

Service Setting of the Hospitality Industry

The service setting or the servicescape of the service industry according to Zeithml et al is very crucial for the overall success of the industry. It is defined as the physical ambience where the service process is carried out. Service setting of a hospitality industry is the physical appearance of the rooms, etc. The service setting of the hospitality industry plays a very important role in the success of the company. There is a lot of effort that is put to the development of the service setting and this extends to the human resource as well. The hospitality industry spends a lot of time and resources in the development of the presentation of the employees. Skill Set of Employees- The employees are expected to be well groomed with a proper soft skill training to handle the guests and customers. The importance of the service setting can be attributed to the fact that there have been many complaints and blacklisting of the different players in the hotel and food industry if there have been any compromises in the service setting. The manufacturing sector on the other hand spends more time in the improvement of the functionality and the quality of the products without much focus on the service setting of the production setup. The hospitality industry on the other hand is able to attract higher revenue per customer once it achieves a minimum level of the servicescape. Training and Development of the employees- The service setting of the hospitality industry determines the training level of the employees. In a regular production based industry, the

training and the development is dependent on the functional and the subject knowledge of the employees. There is not much emphasis on the presentability and the soft skill development of the employees. The employees in the hospitality industry need to be well groomed and the trainings should be more focussed on the soft skills development along with the hard skills. They are taught to be more empathetic and more people oriented rather than function oriented. Recruitment and Selection- The recruitment and the selection of the employees is more based on the ability of the candidate to have good interpersonal skills and the ability to handle the customers well. This is different from the manufacturing industry where the main focus in on the ability of the candidate to know the theoretical aspects of the job. There is a higher amount of the recruitment of the women candidates in the hospitality industry as already established earlier in this paper due to their inherent advantages in the industry.

Conclusion
The type of industry and its different labour characteristics along with the service setting opf the industry goes a long way in the influence of the different aspects of the human resource development. As seen in this paper, the different parts of the human resource influenced by the hospitality industry are the Volume of Employment, Nature of Job, Diversity of the Workforce, Changes in Training and Development, Work Quality and Work timings, Women in the industry, Issue of the Migrant and Contingent Workforce, Effect of the use of contingent workers in the hospitality organization, skill set of the employees and the training and development of the employees. We have seen the influence of the industry on the labour characteristics and compared it to a contrasting product based manufacturing industry.

References
Ilmakunnas, P., & Maliranta, M. (2005). Technology, Labour Characteristics and Wageproductivity Gaps*. Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, 67(5), 623-645. Wood, R. C. (1997) Working in Hotels and Catering, International Thomson Press, 2nd edition. Coupland, D. (1993) Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, Abacus. Zeithaml, V. A., Bitner, M. J., & Gremler, D. D. (2006). Services marketing: Integrating customer focus across the firm. MacDonald, C. and Sirianni, C. (1996) Working in the Service Society, Temple University Press. Parrotta, P., Pozzoli, D., & Pytlikova, M. (2012). Does labor diversity affect firm productivity? (No. 6973). Discussion Paper Series, Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit. Amirtharaj, S. D., Cross, S. K. R., & Vembar, D. V. (2011). Role of Training and Development in Promoting the Growth of Hospitality Industry. International Journal of Management (IJM), 2(1), 126-133. Kalleberg, A. L. (2000). Nonstandard employment relations: Part-time, temporary and contract work. Annual review of sociology, 341-365. Peter, A. (2002). The contingent workforce: Challenges and new directions. American Business Review, 20(2), 103. Hipple, S., & Stewart, J. (1996). Earnings and benefits of contingent and noncontingent workers. Monthly Labor Review, 119(10), 22-30. Retrieved October 27, 2013, from the TUI Library.

Ebighgbo, T. (2011). HUMAN RESOURCES MANAGEMENT IN HOSPITALITY INDUSTRY. The Nigerian Journal of Research and Production Volume, 18(2).