Module 5: Human Resources Management in Hospitality

5.1: The Relevance and Nature of HR in the Hospitality Industry > Watch: Ask the Experts About HR Management
5.1: The Relevance and Nature of HR in the Hospitality Industry > Watch: Assessing the Impact of HR
5.2: Attracting and Selecting Talent > Watch: How Smart Hospitality Organizations Attract Talent
5.3: Developing and Retaining Talent > Watch: Essentials of Talent Development
5.3: Developing and Retaining Talent > Watch: Talent Assessment

Expert Debbie Brown and Marco Benvenuti on HR management:
- Picking people that we think are aligned with the values of our company.
- Building a brand that people working in the hotel will accept as the future of the industry.
- Embed the people into the fun aspect of our company, because we want them to actually wear the brand.
While there’s a lot of uniqueness and it’s important to differentiate your brand and your culture, we do see a number of similarities in terms of how the brand and culture are supported, and much of that is through the human resource management function.

To determine the utility impact of the human resources management function, organizations need to adopt some sort of systematic assessment process.
Those benchmarks then can be used to establish links with broader performance outcomes, such as quality, customer service, and financial performance.
To support the assessment process, many hospitality organizations are adopting technology-based solutions.
Some are designed simply to enhance focal transactional work, such as processing payroll.
Other parts of these technology-based systems can help with competitive business assessment for forecasting and determining future needs.

When organizations attract and select people to help meet their needs, there are a variety of practices and processes that should be completed. These include:
- broader planning activities.
- requirements of the job.
- promote not only the job opportunities, but even the benefits of the organization, your culture, and brand.
You may need to cast a fairly broad net and use a variety of different sources or channels to ensure that you attract the right kinds of applicants.
You need to track your costs and the yield to determine the best sources for those different activities to recruit people to the open positions that you’ve got.

Firms will offer ongoing learning and development opportunities that further enhance not only functional skill requirements and technical aspects of the job, but also a lot of the interpersonal requirements that are very important, especially in hospitality settings.
In many operational environments, more informal on-the-job training is quite common, in which individuals are provided with some structure and opportunities to essentially learn while doing.
Other opportunities are more formal and typically off-the-job in a very focused learning environment, which allows individuals to really acquire specialized knowledge and skill that they can then take back in and utilize to enhance one or more aspects of their job performance.
Many companies are also using blended learning opportunities, which take on-the-job and more typical instructor-led kinds of programs, and infusing that with information technology-based platforms.
When evaluating training and development programs, there are a variety of criteria that you can use to determine if your efforts have been successful.
Formal assessment both in the program itself, and on the job can provide some indication of whether or not the content was learned.
You want to ensure that that knowledge is being utilized on the job and showing up in performance.

The talent management and assessment process is grounded in having really good information about the job.
Usually every year or twice a year, a formal assessment will be conducted in which the individual will be provided an opportunity to learn about how well they were doing over that review cycle as well as set some goals for managing performance in the future.
It’s important to have a complementary process that not only looks back on how well you’ve done but also promotes performance improvement in the future.
It’s really important that you account for performance in a variety of different ways.