Managing People

Michael Riley, Andrew Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136382888
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Industria dell'ospitalità e del turismo
• Index: Business

This new second edition of 'Managing People' provides a practical approach to applying up-to-the-minute management techniques, and is a vital source of information for professionals in the hotel and catering industry responsible for personnel and training. Riley explores how aspects such as labour cost, utilization, labour market behaviour and pay are inseparable from the skills of people management. In the new edition he extends his ideas on productivity so as to encompass its relationship with functional flexibility. In a similar manner, thinking about motivating people is extended to include modern ideas about commitment. We all loosely refer to peoples' attitude but here he shows the complexity that lies behind them. It is especially of relevance for managers with responsibility for personnel and training, and degree-level students will also find its non-prescriptive, user-friendly approach helpful. Michael Riley has extensive experience in the hotel and tourism industry and communicates in a way that reflects that experience.

1 Introduction

Is hotel and catering management unique?

Every industry thinks it is unique and, in a very real sense, each industry is right. Every technological process and each type of service does present different problems to its managers, probably has its own labour markets and, for those who work in it, has its own culture. What is more, the role of uniqueness can never be underestimated in a person's psychology. We all like to be different!

The case for the hotel and catering industry appears to be a particularly strong one. It has, after all, a lot of conspicuous features. What with all those uniforms, strange sounding job titles, tipping and unsocial hours, not to mention the high levels of entrepreneurship and labour mobility. It is not too surprising to hear a claim for being a bit special. The unsocial hours factor alone suggests that, at least as ‘a life’, hotel and catering management is out of the ordinary.

Well, just when you thought it was safe to declare for uniqueness, along come two contrary arguments which together constitute what might be called the pure management approach. Looked at solely as a ‘managerial task’, running a hotel, restaurant or institutional establishment can be seen as a set of systems and processes common to managing anything. This approach does not ignore the special features but treats them as things to be measured and analysed and turned into information that will help managers make good decisions. This is the approach of scientific management. It is greatly undervalued, and therefore underused, by hotel and catering managers. Perhaps the argument that is more easily appreciated is that like any other business, hotel and catering establishments have to make profits and maintain cash flow and, therefore, can be run on business principles. What both these arguments are saying is that ‘business is business’ and ‘managing is managing’ whatever the industry. They are undeniably true, yet acceptance of them does not really contradict the case for uniqueness. They are not mutually exclusive arguments. In addition to the business thinking and the clinical analysis of data, there is the need to know what you are managing, especially in a service industry. In a manufacturing industry there is usually a time gap between production and selling with several processes and intermediary agents in between. This is not so with service industries. There is an immediacy about service which requires managers to anticipate, adjust or react in a time span. This immediacy flows directly from four features of the industry, which are so all pervasive that they account for most of what might be called the character of life in the industry. These features are:

1 Constant fluctuations in short-term customer demand This is often referred to by sales people as short-term sales instability. What it means is that business fluctuates by the week, the day, the hour. For the worker, this means that their job has an irregular work flow. For the business, this means a problem of adjusting labour supply to demand and hence the use of part time and casual labour and a pay system which alters earnings by customer demand, i.e. tipping or some appropriate surrogate.

2 The demand for labour is direct In the hotel and catering industry labour is demanded for what it can produce, people are not machine minders. This means that productivity is based on personal ability and effort. Consequently, there are great individual differences between workers’ output. Concepts of productivity are, therefore, about judgements of human capacity.

3 The subjective nature of standards Concepts like ‘hospitality’, ‘service’, ‘cleanliness’ are all matters of subjective judgement. This means that every worker's output is judged subjectively. This has the effect of making the actual relationships between managers and workers crucial to standards. In a factory this would not be the case at all. There, they would have methods of measuring output formally. When you cannot measure formally it is difficult to build a bureaucracy in the organization. Rules always require specified standards. However, subjectivity means that standards are open to interpretation. Bureaucracy can be a blessing in disguise. In the absence of explicit standards there is a potential for conflicts to arise between workers and customers and between workers themselves – housekeeping want the room to be ‘perfect’, reception want it now; a speed versus quality dilemma.

4 Transferability of skills The kind of skills that workers in the hotel and catering industry possess are generally confined to that industry. This makes for an efficient labour market between the various sectors of the industry. This, together with the relatively unskilled nature of some of the work, encourages the high labour mobility pattern which is often such a conspicuous feature of the industry.

These features create the immediacy which so characterizes management in this industry. It is not to say that managers simply run around ‘coping’ but it is to suggest that there is a tendency for the short term to be dominant. Even going up the hierarchy does not escape the sense of immediacy. The product is perishable. A room not sold tonight is gone forever. Sometimes the fluctuations are of sufficient volume to be constantly developed in respect of the longer view. This is why the thrust of this book is towards managing the present and organizing for the future. Knowing your business means knowing what is possible and what your customer considers to be good. What with all this fluctuation and subjectivity around the one thing you must be is organized! This book argues that the management of labour in the hotel and catering industry has to accommodate the primary characteristics of the industry. Perhaps it would be useful at this point just to list the characteristics that are likely to be found in the hotel and catering industry:

A set of skills specific to the industry.

A range of skills for each occupation.

Subjectively judged standards.

Unevenly paced work.

Seasonal employment patterns.

Lack of bureaucracy.

Complicated pay systems.

An in-built speed versus quality dilemma.

Unsocial hours.

Part-time and casual employment.

Most of these conspicuous characteristics can be explained by the four principal features. Managers are part of the features. It is the context in which they manage. Recognizing this, the book focuses on the understanding of behaviour and the understanding of labour markets as the two primary educational needs of managers in the industry. It also recognizes that ‘business is business’ and ‘managing is managing’ and good practice in management applies everywhere. The immediacy of hotel and catering management does not deny the need for good, or excuse bad, administrative and investigative techniques. For this reason, the book explains relevant and useful techniques of labour administration and tackles issues that are crucial to the corporate management of labour.

Stating the problem

The problem can be seen everywhere. Here a manager tries to persuade a worker to do something, there a manager issues a reprimand, another worries over the performance of a group, yet another listens to a gripe. Meanwhile, someone else is designing a new control system, while a colleague contemplates redesigning a form. They all have something in common. Everyone is making assumptions about how people will behave. Here then is ‘the’ problem. We cannot look into the feelings and motives of our workforce, we have to work with the only clue available – behaviour. Whether we are aware of it or not, in everything that we do we are constantly making assumptions of cause (what lies behind it) and deductions about consequences (what it will lead to). In other words, everything in management, even when it doesn't involve dealing with people, involves making assumptions about how people will behave. There are a few guiding stars – experience is certainly one – but theoretical knowledge is another. The heart of the problem is not merely the fact that you can only work from behaviour but also the sheer complexity which lies behind that behaviour — people are impossible to understand!

Are they? Well, yes and no. Remember there are limits to what you, as a manager, need to understand: you are not a psychiatrist. Within limits, people can be understood, but many people give up. For them, the human aspects of management are seen as ‘impossible’, since it is claimed that ‘we are all different, anyway’.

This is the original sin of human resource management. A moment's thought, however, tells us that that statement is both true and false. We are all different, but it is plainly obvious that we are also the same. We all have, to varying degrees of efficiency, the same mental processes (motor drives, memory, cognitive mechanisms, reasoning processes, etc.) and what is more, a great deal of our behaviour is in fact similar and predictable: social life would be intolerable were that not the case. The idea of ‘common’ behaviour is a helpful clue in attributing the cause of some behaviour we see.

Common behaviour is behaviour that recurs irrespective of the people involved and as such can be seen in various unconnected situations. If behaviour can be seen in various locations, at various times, involving different people and yet be essentially the same, we might assume that the cause of such behaviour could be something external to the participant rather than internal within them. We then must look for what that might be – a common situational variable. This is where experience comes into interpreting behaviour. If you've seen it all before with a different case, then some external factor is likely to be at work. A chef and a waiter having an argument at the hotplate can be seen everywhere. Speed versus quality conflict? Even if you don't fall for the original sin, there is another line of resistance and that is to keep it simple. It's natural but often wrong.

There are no universal principles of management in respect of managing people. If there were, we would all simply learn them and be good at it. Acceptance of this alone is the springboard for learning about the relationship between people and work. There is a difference between keeping it simple and being simplistic. No one can doubt that as managers get older they find an approach to people which ‘works for them’. A kind of melding of authority with personality. This is natural and good but simplistic approaches are invariably wrong. This is not to say there aren't techniques which can be learnt and which will help managers in their tasks. There are, and some of them are addressed in Part Three of this book. After all, the management of people is not a tea and sympathy exercise and just because things are complex doesn't mean we shouldn't approach them with professional skill.

Perhaps a more attractive line of resistance to complexity lies in ‘common sense’. Everybody has common sense theories about what makes themselves and others ‘tick’. You will find that these are not too far adrift from the writings of eminent psychologists. Let's put theory into perspective.

Theory is practical!

The best way to see theory (your own or academic theory) is as a Sherpa. He will carry some of your bags and guide you up most of the mountain, but doesn't do the climbing for you and won't take you to the top. As there is no general theory of behaviour, it would be more realistic to see theories as a bunch of rather truculent Sherpas, each with their own ideas about best routes to the top, most of them at variance with each other. But they are necessary and helpful. Remember, the purpose of theory is to explain practice, to explain the behaviour you observe. It is helpful.

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