The Methodologies of the Hospitality Industry

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Managing Culture Shock
Managing Recruitment
Culturally Diverse Company Policy
Measuring and Monitoring Company Policy
Appraisal
Recommendations
Conclusion
List of References

Introduction

Culture refers to the set of norms which dictate the principles or values in a given community. Cultural diversity refers to a variety of dissimilar societies or individuals with unique origins, religions, as well as customs living and socialising together. The significance of managing cultural diversity is obvious in the hospitality industry. The industry experiences high rate of international mobility.

It is apparent that the management has to establish innovative strategies of dealing with cultural diversity issues (Brotherton 2003, P. 11). This report gives an explanation of the methodologies that the hospitality industry might apply to attain a competitive advantages. The basic rationale for management of cultural diversity is to enable smooth and effective business operations.

Its management creates a sense of tolerance and understanding amongst the stakeholders (Acevedo 2012). Additionally, its effective management enhances an organization’s competitiveness, productivity, and profitability. This is because the instances of conflicts are greatly minimized.

Generally, firms that have effective cultural diversity management techniques have a high competitive edge. Observably, there are notable disadvantages accruing to the management of cultural diversity. These include heavy expenditures as well as extensive business hours allocated for management trainings.

Managing Culture Shock

Culture shock is a common incidence when people get exposed to new or unique surroundings that have unfamiliar cultures. A proper management strategy for culture shock would reduce its negative impacts and enhance the performance of the service sector (Foley 2010).

Organizations within the hospitality sector should set up training and capacity building programs for their employees on the methodologies of alleviating culture shock. Additionally, the employees within this sector ought to know how to manage the challenge.

Culture shock may be propagated by an anxiety that emerges from a person losing their entire familiar sings as well as symbols vital in social intercourse (Marx 2001, P. 57). Language for instance precipitates the problem. In order to attain a competitive advantage, organizations within the hospitality sector ought to recruit and train its employees on a variety of aspects.

Interpersonal skills are vital since they enhance knowledge transfer; improve coordination as well as control. Such skills if majored on will enable stakeholders to establish effective relationships and build trust. Linguistic ability will assist the organization to establish contact (Acevedo 2012).

Corporations within the hospitality sector should also encourage their workers to gain the motivation of living overseas. This enhances their cultural curiosity, which is a vital recipe for successful adaptation. The capacity of an organization as well as its employees to develop tolerance during uncertainties or ambiguities is critical.

Global managers within the sector ought to develop the capacity to deal with multiple perspectives any time. The management system should also be flexible to contain such transformations in cultures and act as a role model.

Managing Recruitment

Recruitment involves the process through which organizations acquire or bring new employees on board. Analytically, this human resource function remains crucial for organizations within the hospitality industry. Ideally, the management of such organizations should ensure fair and just systems of recruitment (Lewis 1999, P.85).

However, it is apparent that there are basic considerations to be made during the process particularly within multicultural dimensions. To enhance effective performance within multicultural settings, the employees to be recruited should be evaluated in terms of their interpersonal skills as well as abilities to survive within mixed cultures.

Multilingual employees are most preferred within such sectors (Warner & Joynt 2002, P. 114). Additionally, they ought to have the attributes of patience as well as respect. Their cultural empathy should also be tested. This is because the attribute would help them appreciate thoughts, the feelings as well as others’ experience.

A focussed listener with a non-judgemental attitude is most preferable to be recruited. It is upon the management to test and evaluate on the best workers necessary in which department within the organization (Schneider & Barsoux 2003, P. 123). Failure to ensure a stringent and flexible recruitment process automatically leads to failure.

This is because the workers form the basic foundation for effective organizational performance. Other critical skills to be observed by the management include strong sense of self as well as humour. Such employees are able to integrate with other cultures without the threat of losing their identity.

Humour remains a vital coping method for relationship development. In order to increase their competitiveness, the management ought to culminate the recruitment process with thorough apprenticeship programs and image building for its new employees.

Culturally Diverse Company Policy

Cultural diversity is increasingly being a challenge and a captivating feature of both individual lives as well as the contexts in which companies and institutions operate. Because of the obvious challenges, most organizations particularly within the culturally-sensitive sectors have taken drastic policy initiatives.

A policy herein refers to a statement of procedures guiding the stakeholders within organizations on how responsibilities should be conducted. Foremost, successful organizations apply diversity within their workforce to gain competitive advantage (Nicolson 2012). Organizations have adopted policies that increase the cultural variety within their workforce.

These have augmented the benefits of having workers of diverse backgrounds within these companies. To enhance their competitive advantage, recruit diversity has been a basic policy for most companies. Under this policy, the companies have actively searched for employment persons from an array of cultural backgrounds (Marx 2001, P. 117).

The companies have also adopted policies that stimulate understanding of diversity benefits. In this regard, the management has used training programs to elucidate the advantages of indulging diverse ideas within the organization. Additionally, trainings on brainstorming approaches have been incorporated. Teamwork policies have been critical in most culturally diverse organizations.

When adequately incorporated, the policy helps to develop the feeling and spirit of unity as well as togetherness towards a collective goal. In teamwork, the objective for a collective goal overrides the diversity of members. This forms a quality recipe for competitive advantage within organizations.

The vision statements as well as corporate policies should be sound and solid to enhance competitiveness amidst cultural diversity (Anca &Vazquez 2007, P.45). The corporate vision statement ought to be constructed in a manner that reflects the organization’s commitment to cultural diversity.

This should be backed-up by a powerful vision. The company’s time-off policies should also prop up cultural uniqueness for holidays as well as religious observances. Other policies should also outline the training of managers on cultural diversity sensitivity.

Measuring and Monitoring Company Policy

Most organizations implementing or observing diversity policies lack a systematic measurement and review methodology in place for purposes of monitoring (Gysin & Parker 2010, P. 46). However, it is observable that the importance of measurement as well as monitoring such o organizational policies can never be assumed particularly if the company seeks to gain a competitive advantage.

There is a variety of monitoring as well as feedback processes that already exists for utilization by such organizations. Ideally, the basic step for any company policy monitoring initiative is to establish and draw out the deliverables or indicators to be verified or tested periodically.

Setting up the interval for indicator test is vital as this ensures the smooth or continuous flow of progress reports necessary for observation by the management. The prevalent performance indicators include the enhanced women representation, disabled individuals as well as ethnic minorities (Lewis 1999, P.145).

It is critical to note that the monitoring processes should also be intensive at senior or organizational management level. Employee opinion surveys (EOS) are critical methodologies for conducting such monitoring or measurements. This is because workers are the first critical stakeholders of the company.

In this participatory regard, the management or the human resource department is able to note whether there are cases of discrimination based either on gender, race, sexuality, or religious belief (Gong 2008). Consequently, policies that infringe on the rights of the workers can be reviewed to be more accommodative.

Monitoring is crucial to retain the focus on equality of opportunities. The human resource monitors and measures the workers’ records; it also benchmarks the company’s general performance and help in the identification and resolution of any unusual pattern.

Regular monitoring is necessary to ensure the company’s policies on diversity become transformative and competitive. Quarterly statistics must be gathered and discussed by the organization’s group board. In this regard, performance management targets should be established for particular sections in need of advancement (Wetherell 2008, P. 90).

This should be conducted along with the appropriate support as well as training. The human resource must also monitor the worker’s central database to check for the compliance of the diversity policy. Raising emerging concerns and trends relating to diversity to the divisional directors is a necessary monitoring initiative.

Appraisal

Cultural appraisal is a critical initiative for enhancing performance and cultural diversity competence within organizations. However, most organizations even within the hospitality sector have not recognized this vitality (Foley 2010). An understanding of the efficiency as well as convenience of every worker appraisal evaluation is critical.

Performance appraisals are crucial within the organizations. This is more specifically to the executive management. The competency of every employee or manager to appreciate and respect cultural diversity within the organization is important (Kirton & Greene 2000, P. 62).

Thus, employee cultural diversity competency appraisal will be necessary to weed out or reprimand those without the attribute. The human resource professionals within organizations are charged with the responsibility of conducting cultural appraisals to all employees regardless of the cadre.

Recommendations

Capacity building as well as apprenticeship remains basic for ensuring the proper management of cultural diversity. For international corporations within the hospitality sector, the managers ought to alleviate notable barriers to successful integration of global staff within the workforce. Training programs ought to concentrate on training objectives, which should be practical and job-specific (Heinemann 2002, P. 77).

Encouraging team work among culturally diverse workers and improving cross-cultural skills ought to be embedded within the n capacity building goals. These would enhance employee participation and ultimately assist in facilitating the identification of cultural disparities. Moreover, induction initiatives could be established for newly-arrived international employees.

There should be opportunities for career development for the workers. Furthermore, the employees ought to be encouraged to develop their linguistic capabilities. As stated earlier, multilingual capabilities are very critical for overcoming cultural diversity setbacks within the hospitality sector (Anca &Vazquez 2007, P.91).

For this reason, the recruitment process should take into consideration the multiple language competencies amongst the potential candidates for employment. In addition, the skills training schemes ought to be developed into diverse languages.

For instance, French, German, Spanish Irish, Russian, English as well as Polish languages would provide a better platform for cultural diversity management amongst employees in the hospitality sector (Go & Pine 1995, P. 87).

Service excellence programs also ought to be translated into the diverse languages and given to all workers. In cases of newly arrived international or foreign workers, there should be an initial welcome workshop for all of them (Kirton & Greene 2000, P. 112).

This should focus on cultural orientation of the host state and issues of customer relations, health and safety, as well as team work. Equality and fair distribution of employees within the senior or management positions within the organization based on diverse cultures is important. This particularly promotes the spirit of inclusiveness and alleviates ill-motives or feeling of being sidelined in minority groups.

Conclusion

The competitive global economy, steady globalization of organizations, and transformations within demographic patterns as well as labour structure pose immense challenges to management within the hospitality sector. It is clear that understanding and controlling diversity has gained importance within the contemporary hospitality sector.

Cultural diversity offers enormous opportunities as well as benefits to organizations within the hospitality sector. However, it is important to note that these organizations continue to be confronted by great challenges of managing multicultural workplaces. To achieve a competitive edge, several cultural barriers including communication obstacles, discrimination as well as stereotypes must be overcome.

To increase knowledge and sensitivity on cultural diversity management, appropriate training schedule must be designed and carried out within the sector. Hospitality graduate trainees must be educated on multicultural management knowledge as well as skills. The companies, particularly the human resource units must develop and carry out effective training schedules for workers.

Additionally, they should offer diversity management training to workers to enhance their familiarity and sensitivity to cultural uniqueness. Moreover, those within management in the hospitality sector require rigorous and intensive apprenticeship on interpersonal skills and competencies. This is because they are the leaders to intervene during conflicts or crises and also act as role models to other employees.

List of References

Acevedo, L. 2012, Strategies for Culture Diversity in the Workplace. Web.

Anca, D. & Vazquez, A. 2007, Managing Diversity in the Global Organisation, Macmillan, New York, US.

Brotherton, B. 2003, International Hospitality Industry, Butterworth, Oxford, UK.

Foley, M. 2010, Expat Advice on How to Manage Culture Shock. Web.

Go, F. & Pine, R. 1995, Globalisation Strategy in the Hotel Industry, Routledge, London, UK.

Gong, Y. 2008, Managing cultural diversity in hospitality industry” UNLV Theses/Dissertations/Professional Papers/Capstones. Web.

Gysin, V. & Parker, A. 2010, Equality and diversity policy. Web.

Heinemann, N. 2002, Building Workplace Equality. Ethics, Diversity and Inclusion, Thomson, London, UK.

Kirton, G. & Greene, A. 2000, The Dynamics of Managing Diversity, Butterworth Heinemann, Oxford, UK.

Lewis, R. 1999, When Cultures Collide – Managing Successfully Across Cultures, Nicholas Brealey Publishing, London, UK.

Marx, E. 2001, Breaking through culture shock: what you need to succeed in international business, Nicholas Brealey, London.

Nicolson, K. 2012, Cultural diversity, IBM style. Web.

Schneider; S. & Barsoux, J. 2003, Managing Across Cultures, Prentice Hall, London, UK.

Warner, M. & Joynt, P. 2002, Managing Across Cultures: Issues and Perspectives, Thomson Learning, London, UK.

Wetherell, M. 2008, Identity, Ethnicity, Diversity and Community Cohesion, SAGE Publications, California, US.

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