Pocket Guide for Hospitality Managers

Conrad Lashley, Michael N. Chibili

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000036077
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios en general

A concise, practical guide that provides the skills and knowledge for current and future managers across the hospitality industry.

The book provide a concise resource for all emerging hospitality managers, and for academics preparing students for
careers within the hospitality industry.With a 'how to do' agenda, the authors offer a practical guide to the skills and knowledge needed by those who will be managing bars, restaurants and hotels in the fast moving hospitality retailing contexts.

Written in a non-academic style, this book will be a valuable resource for students and early career managers working in the hospitality sector.

1

Hospitality services management

1.1 Knowing your hospitality business

In the past, many people thought that the key to successful hospitality business was ‘location, location, location’. In other words, the location of the property was the most important factor in determining its success. There are many successful pubs, restaurants and other hospitality businesses, which are in poor locations yet still manage to build sales and good profits. It’s not so much where your business is located, but what goes on inside it.

This chapter aims to show that although hospitality businesses are different, customers expect the quality of product and services to match their expectations. Good managers understand what customers want, and recognise that employees - their selection, training, motivation, reward and management are key to customer satisfaction.

1.2 Hospitality businesses pros & cons

Hospitality organisations provide food and/or drink and/or accommodation in a service context. Each of these terms needs close consideration if you are to understand the nature of the business you are managing.

Hospitality organisations provide these services in a way that is:

• Branded: usually sold under a brand name through a chain of restaurants, bars, cafés, pubs or hotels. The brand will represent a cluster of attributes or benefits to customers who have a pretty good idea of what to expect when entering the premises.

• Customer focussed: a consequence of branding is to shape the nature of the products and services that make up the brand to particular customer types and needs and experiences. Issues to do with age, gender, social class, income, region, consumption patterns and service needs help retailers to consider the nature of the brand and the messages required by customers.

• Standardised: though this will vary according to the nature of the brand and business, standardisation follows from the requirement of customers for consistency and predictability. Typically, the menu of items, the prices charged, décor and building layout are standardised across all units.

• Consistent in quality: management of the hospitality experience has to be concerned with ensuring the customers get the experience they expect. That is, not only the physical products but also the type of service they get from staff must be consistent and in line with customer expectations. Thus the management of service quality, staff training and performance appraisal become important tools for the manager.

• Managed via operating systems: consistency and standardisation across hundreds or thousands of units usually require that all operate to a centrally designed system which guides the way that products are purchased, assembled and served. In many cases these systems also lay down how training, recruitment and other staff management issues are to be handled.

• Sales driven: using techniques from the retail goods sector hospitality businesses are concerned to ensure that communication with customers is clear. The nature of the product and services on offer are stated in a way that allows minimal confusion and misunderstanding. Point of sale material and staff training in ‘up-selling’ techniques, together with an array of other techniques attempt to maximise the sale to each customer.

• Mass marketed: to generate customer identification and to shape clear communications with customers hospitality organisations frequently use mass advertising through television and newspapers, as well as other promotional techniques to inform customers about the brand and services on offer.

Over the past few decades, branded hospitality businesses have taken an increasing share of restaurant, bar, café and hotel business in many countries. The consistency of service, lower costs through the scale of their operations and appeal of a variety of brands to target markets have ensured wide success.

As a unit manager, probably working in one of these branded businesses, you need to understand the nature of the brand in which you are working. That is, what is it that customers are buying into? With this understanding you are able to focus on customer expectations and what has to be done to ensure customer expectations are met. Most importantly, as a unit manager you need to understand and work within the disciplines of the brand. Customers who experience different services, prices, quality and service in different establishments in the same brand will become confused about what the brand represents. Their expectations become less clear and more uncertain. A likely consequence is that they will seek out a competitor who is more consistent.

Whilst branded hospitality services have been very successful in capturing an increased share of hospitality service business, they face some difficult issues to manage. Many of the features of these operations which have brought about their success also lead to problems.

• Management skills: the closely defined brand supported with operating systems, quality management techniques and policies derived at head office can lead organisations to adopt a command and control style which allows little scope for individual manager or employee initiative. Unit managers are expected to work to the ‘one best way’. As we shall see, for some businesses this is consistent with the offer to customers, but sometimes it creates unnecessary difficulties, because you may feel stifled and discouraged from being creative in your work. This pocket guide shows that there are a number of ways that your skills as a unit manager can be tapped and developed to the benefit of the brand.

• Employee dissatisfaction: again the operating systems, tight product specification and ‘one best way’ job design allow little scope for individual flair and creativity. Employees experience jobs that are tightly controlled, routine and monotonous. On top of this, the uneven pace of work in many hospitality services, together with difficulties inherent in serving customers add additional stress to hospitality service work. Consequently, many hospitality operations face high labour turnover. It is not unusual for some hospitality businesses to experience average labour turnover over 150 per cent per year across the whole brand, with some jobs and units recording labour turnover over 500 per cent per year. Apart from the direct costs of replacing staff, which can be a considerable added cost in itself, you as the manager will face difficulties through the sheer volume of recruitment, selection, and training that you have to undertake. When labour turnover is occurring at high levels, a constant stream of new employees are joining and leaving the organisation. In these circumstances it is difficult to communicate and train employees to the desired standards.

• Service inconsistencies: problems occur for several reasons. Firstly the very scale of these organisations means that they are attempting to deliver consistent customer experiences through a very large number of units. Thousands of management personnel and tens of thousands of staff must all share an understanding of the brand and be prepared to work within the rigidities of operating procedures. With so many people involved, there are clearly many opportunities for things to go wrong. The very nature of service contact means that both employees and customers may react inconsistently with each other. Customer perceptions of different employees will shape the way they evaluate the service and employees as people. It may be unrealistic to expect employees to always act with good grace and with a desire to delight the customer. Now and again tiredness, boredom, and frustration with management may cause service problems.

• Customer service needs: whilst customers are attracted to the certainties of the branded service operation, they often dislike being treated as a number. Customer expectations vary in different brands. In some cases the individual wants more consistency and standardisation, and in other cases they may want the service to be more personal and shaped to them. The same individual may want different experiences from the same hospitality operation depending on their mood, the time of day and the occasion as shown in Figure 1.1.

FIGURE 1.1 Typical hospitality customer service need

Furthermore, customer service needs are dynamic. As more people experience hospitality services, their expectations are moving and shifting. Hospitality service organisations have to constantly review and audit customer expectations. They can never sit back and assume they know what customers want.

• Local and regional tastes: branded hospitality services may come across tension in the need to maintain the standardised brand through which customers learn to know what to expect, and local or regional tastes that cut across the standard brand. That is, customers may expect to be able to order certain drinks or products in the local restaurant or pub, but the brand does not normally stock these items, and instructs the managers not to provide services ‘out of brand’.

• The ‘big is ugly’ syndrome: As we have seen, the scale and coverage of these hospitality business operations brings advantages through cost reduction and standardisation, but large organisations can be unwieldy and slow to change. In fast moving consumer markets, such as in the hospitality business sector, much standardised operating systems and centralised controls can be a disadvantage. The narrow span of control and tall hierarchies that help the organisation to manage consistency over a lot of units makes for long lines of communication and slow decision-making processes. It is, therefore, very easy for these organisations to miss changes in consumer taste and be unresponsive to variations in the customer base.

1.3 Possible solutions

Many hospitality organisations recognise the various problems that they face and are looking to alternative ways of managing their businesses. This pocket guide advocates a more empowered approach to hospitality unit management.

The hospitality unit managers and staff have the key role in delivering hospitality services, they need to be empowered in its true sense to manage the business and service encounters in ways which:

1 Gives them the authority to do whatever it takes to deliver the service that customers want. Within the limits of the brand, there should be flexibility to meet customer needs.

2 Ensures that all concerned are given the skills to do the job. Adequate training and being allowed to be effective is the basic building block of empowerment.

3 Ensures that the managers and staff are recognised and rewarded for their contribution to successful service. Removing barriers to empowerment and developing a sense of personal effectiveness is the defining feature of empowerment. Through this, all concerned share a sense of ownership with customer satisfaction and the success of the venture.

4 Develops organisation control systems that need to be both ‘tight and loose’. In other words the organisation system needs to control those issues which are essential for business success – standardisation of the essentials but which also allow for local responsiveness.

5 Manages the organisation through a flat structure that minimises the number of management levels in the organisation, thereby enabling short lines of communication and quick decision-making.

6 Encourages initiative and creativity. A learning organisation should be prepared for people to make mistakes, provided people are able to think about their errors and learn from the experience.

The following chapters in this pocket guide discuss this approach further and provide a course of sessions that will help you as a unit manager to be more effective in managing hospitality business operations. Before that it is important that you understand the nature of hospitality services and variations between different types and levels of service offered.

1.4 About services

At the beginning of this chapter we said that hospitality business involved the supply of food and/or drink and/or accommodation in a service co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• 1 Hospitality services management
• 2 Empowering unit management
• 3 Team leadership and motivation
• 4 Working with people
• 5 Staff turnover and retention
• 6 Staff recruitment and selection
• 7 Employee development and training
• 8 Managing service quality
• 9 Time management and activity planning
• 10 Control and operating profit management
• 11 Food and beverage cost management
• 12 Labour cost management
• 13 Sales generation and marketing
• 14 Preparing a unit’s business plan
• About the authors
• Bibliography