Acquiring the right talent at the right time will always be a key focus in the hospitality industry. With newer hotels and brands entering the Indian market, the human resource departments are adopting strategies to attract and retain the best talent, both fresh and lateral hires By Kahini Chakraborty
Being an industry that is closely linked to the the country’s tourism growth, the hospitality sector has been continuously seeing a high number of employee turnover. The two most important reasons for the same being-quality of leadership and overall work culture, and impact on family life. Dissatisfaction with current compensation and benefits, growth opportunities abroad and completing higher studies are also common reasons for attrition across hotels in India. Attrition rates across hospitality industry in general are unsustainable and probably in the range of 35-40 per cent per year. The reasons are many but the most significant one is no doubt the fact that whilst significant growth in room inventory supply in the last few years has exploded the demand for human capital, the supply especially of quality manpower has severely lagged behind. There is a critical mismatch between skills and talents needed on the one hand and that of supply on the other hand resulting in the available ‘hot talent’ being pursued by all key industry players leading to short tenures everywhere.
Gurmeet Singh, area director of human resource, India Subcontinent, Marriott International Inc opines, “I firmly believe that once people have understood the needs and demands of their particular job, their cultural learning and intellectual stimulation comes to an end rather soon, causing people to lose interest in their jobs and start looking elsewhere.” Retaining the right talent has always been an issue in the hospitality sector. The investment that goes into recruiting, training and honing on-the-job skills leads to both tangible and intangible loss when a productive resource leaves the organisation. The entry of international hotel chains and mushrooming of high-end hotels in the tier-II and tier-III cities has been driving the attrition. This apart, cruise-line opportunities are a big lure for hotel management professionals because of non-taxable big pay hikes.
“Off late hospitality professionals have had multiple career options ie multiplexes, retails chains, BPOs, multi-national companies, banks and other financial organisations. Preference for hospitality professionals is on an increase as grooming and etiquette become their second nature,” says Geeta A Sundrani, director, Oasis Human Resources, adding that, “hotels want more number of female employees compared to male employees. They look to have atleast 20-25 per cent female employees but they are not able to get that many number. A good hotel would have atleast a minimum of 15 per cent female employees.”
Carefully formulated long-term strategies need to be worked out to prevent this loss and retain the people asset – who hold the key to business survival and growth in the services-focused industry. Commenting on the same, Ashwin Shirali, regional director, human resources, AccorHotels India states, “Employee attrition to a certain extent is healthy and even desirable as it allows an organisation to let go of the ‘old’ and usher in the ‘new’ in terms of skills, energy, enthusiasm and passion. The challenge is when the level of attrition crosses acceptable levels not only in terms of numbers but also when it is high quality talent that walks out of the door making attrition highly dysfunctional impacting organisational business results.”
Retention strategies
Elaborating on the company’s different employee retention strategies starting from a trainee to senior employee, Shirali says, “There are differences in retention strategies across the hierarchy as employee expectations and needs are different. We do believe that a happy and satisfied employee will be unlikely to leave in a hurry. At a base level, at AccorHotels, therefore we guarantee for all our associates across all hierarchical levels a work environment; that is caring, respectful, nurturing, trusting and upholds ones dignity, confidence, well-being and self-esteem; that promotes diversity by forbidding any form of discrimination with regard to gender, age, family situation, race, physical disabilities; that rewards and recognises talent by creating an environment in which any employee can be promoted to any position within the organisation, provided he or she has the necessary skills, personal qualities and accomplishments; that pays a fair wage and benefits in keeping with the specificities of talent and in tune with market benchmarks; which supports personal development by initiating a career path process when new employees are hired, by anticipating, listening and responding to employee needs and expectations, by regularly conducting opinion surveys to give employees a greater voice within the organisation, by providing all employees with visibility on their career development prospects. For employees who are more senior, the focus apart from the above is aimed at providing superior training and development opportunities to allow them to rise to their full potential; offering multiple platforms to be visible; providing challenging job roles and assignments to allow the employee to improve employable skills and enhance the feeling of self-worth and self-esteem.” AccorHotels in India has a virtual training academie which offers a variety of structured learning experiences to assist employees meet their professional development needs, promote the acquisition and development of skills to improve the quality of service offered to customers. Academie Accor offers more than 150 leadership, behavioural related training and offering different training solutions to various needs. Academie Accor Online University offers training solutions to help managers learn at their own pace.
While for Marriott, Singh states, “A people strategy is not effective if it doesn’t include a comprehensive and effective methodology to hold on to the employees whom you’ve worked hard to hire into your organisation. Our retention strategy is not a ‘one size fits all’ approach, and we work with our teams across all our hotel units to aggressively drive retention across all levels and disciplines. One of our key initiatives has been to promote and develop home grown talent at our junior, middle and senior management levels through various different self-paced, online and classroom workshops that cater to different requirements of the organisation.”
On the other hand, Starwood has multi-pronged strategy for retention which is a part of our overall HR Strategy of ADR (Attract, Develop and Retain). Ritu S Verma, regional director, human resources, South Asia – Starwood Hotels & Resorts India informs, “One of our key strategies – Starwood Careers Month is set to be a refreshed extension of the successful Starwood Careers Day. We are proud to celebrate and focus on Starwood’s distinctiveness that sets us apart – passionate people, our 10 compelling lifestyle brands, belonging to something bigger through our involvement in the communities in which we operate; and embracing what’s new through our culture of innovation. Starwood Careers Month will not only focus on recruitment but will also comprise of activities revolved around talent diversity and internal talent career growth and development.”
Zubin Ghiara, vice president- human resources and development, Sarovar Hotels & Resorts highlights that at Sarovar Hotels, the retention strategy begins with the recruitment process. “We ensure that we hire employees who believe in long term commitment and have a desire to grow. We then invest in their learning and growth through continuous training and education schemes. Our team of HR professionals ensure continuous employee engagement initiatives, creating a fun work environment by involving employees in sports, CSR and other talent based activities. We follow a clearly defined appraisal system linked to a variety of reward and recognition programmes. Employees at all levels benefit from Sarovar being a progressive, growing organisation,” he adds.
Key essentials
Every hotel wants to attract the best and brightest talent, but management of human capital detemines the success of the future. At Marriott, the company believes in hiring for attitude, training for skill, and developing people for the company’s future growth needs. “Our time tested strategy to recruit employees is spearheaded by people who know the hotels best: its own staff. We believe that everyone at Marriott should be and is involved in attracting talent to the company. In addition, every unit HR leader is assigned external talent targets, to bring in to our organisation, and we have seen that such relationship driven initiatives have proved successful at all times of need,” mentions Singh.
Verma points out that ‘right attitude’ and ‘aptitude’ are important. “We at Starwood hire candidates who have the potential to learn, evolve and grow with the company, those who are willing to embrace the Starwood Cares culture and make a valuable contribution while realising their own personal and professional aspirations. We don’t just provide a job, we provide a career. Inter personal skills, team work, communication skills, empathy and an ability to flex your style are key skills required to excel in this industry,” she adds. Sarovar’s recruitment parameters at the junior level are largely behavioural. At the senior level the company focuses on experiential parameters. “We ensure that all employees joining Sarovar Hotels are career oriented, stable, have a passion for excellence, a strong desire to grow and are customer focused,” stresses Ghiara.
Global practices
Starwood recognises that its 145,000 worldwide employees are key to the company’s success. They acknowledge this by recognising ‘knowledge and growth through learning’ in their value statement. This emphasis on learning enables Starwood employees to continually meet the company’s high standards and keep pace with the constantly changing conditions of the hospitality industry. “Our strategies for ensuring employee retention and growth include creating an inclusive work environment, following a clearly defined vision, mission and credo, creating updated and realistic operational policies and procedures and establishing a safe, fun, performance-driven culture,” emphasises Ghiara.
Marriott International is an associate driven organisation its policies and practices resonate with the company’s core philosophy of ‘taking care of the associates so that they take care of the guests’. The company is extremely focused on knowing how the associates feel about working in the organisation, and every year in June, an online engagement survey is conducted across all our 4200 hotels and business units, spread over more than 70 countries and in nearly 24 different languages. This survey reveals the pulse of the organisation, and lets them know how associates rate their work culture amongst the parameters of overall engagement, leadership, teamwork, quality of life at work, and total rewards. This serves as a thermometer to continuously improve year on year, and work towards retaining our associates.
Measures for challenges
“Some amount of employee attrition is inevitable,” says Ghiara, adding that, the younger generation of employees would like to see quick progress in their careers. Many are adventurous and would like to explore other industries. “At Sarovar we keep ourselves one step ahead and well prepared through proactive recruitment and operational strategies. We also believe in nurturing relationships with all our employees, past and present. We welcome good performers to return to the team,” he mentions.
Acknowledging the fact that every organisation suffers when good people leave, Singh reasons this by stating, “This can be reflected in its customer dissatisfaction, loss of sales, increased of cost of turnover, loss of reputation, reduction in quality of workforce and increased workload of existing employees, to name a few. Healthy attrition is always welcome, as it helps churn in fresh talent and new ideas, however, not to the extent that it becomes overwhelming and alarming.”
Pointing at other challenges, Shirali says that enhanced recruitment and retraining costs usually estimated to be close to six months’ salary; inability of the organisational values and culture to take root and exercise a consistent and meaningful role in the success of the organisation; loss of guest recognition and consequential adverse impact on guest perception and satisfaction; enhanced pressure on remaining team members as there is always a time lag for new staff to come aboard and start delivering; feeling of uncertainty at the work place as familiar faces keep leaving causing even otherwise loyal team members to feel unstable and insecure; inability to build a meaningful talent pool as people are not just around long enough to be judged and evaluated; and continuous investments in training and development for newly joined associates leading to enhanced costs that could have been avoided.
Shirali further mentions, for AccorHotels in India, attrition will be a key challenge going forward and they have an active retention strategy to ensure that key talent and those occupying critical roles remain with the organisation and is developed to staff the growing pipeline. The seven pronged strategy to retain talent spans: Ensuring a non-hierarchical, informal, transparent, culturally sensitive work environment that exemplifies Accor values; early identification of ‘High Performers” and “High Potential” across all levels and functions in a scientific manner to ensure development and thereby retention; ensure the talent pool has high visibility within the country and outside as well; ensure we pay a premium salary and benefits package to the members of this talent pool that is benchmarked with the best in competition; offer strong, pro-active and tailor made training and development opportunities including on the job missions and special projects to ensure that they are ready to occupy positions of higher responsibility; ensure that the talent that is so developed and trained is deployed in preference to all other talent internal and external in the numerous opportunities that arise in the Group; and India wide Recognition Rewards across all functions and levels that brings on centre stage the best talent and allows our associates to see how merit is rewarded.
Ghiara boasts, “In the 20 years I have worked with Sarovar Hotels, I have witnessed an organisation with no politics, freedom to function, rewards for results achieved and growth in the team at each and every level of the organisation. The ethics and values on which the organisation rests, the policies that interpret those values and the positive physical work environment make Sarovar the strongest player in the hospitality field.”
The first Marriott hotel in India opened in Goa in 1998. In 2015, the company has 28 operating hotels in India across various brands and locations, and a staff strength of nearly 7,500. Elaborating on the same, Singh says, “Today we can boast about our crop of home grown senior managers who started their careers with us as line level associates or as supervisors – 90 per cent of our senior leadership has been grown from within, including some of our general managers, and this is testament to our culture to promote and develop talent from within. We run our own internal executive and managerial development programmes at each of our units, and nearly 95 per cent of our junior management has been developed and promoted from within, and this has played a key role in our retention as well as Marriott being the best employer in the hospitality industry for the past so many years.” Marriott’s hiring philosophy is simple – hiring for attitude and training for skill. “Our associate-driven culture; and our passion for developing our people has been the key reason why our company has been recognised as a Best Employer for the past 10 continuous years in India,” highlights Singh. At Accor, at their India hotels over 45 per cent of the managerial teams are staffed from within and over 80 per cent of their general managers are from within the existing talent pool.