Enhancing Workforce Diversity in the Hospitality Industry

What is contemporary leadership in hospitality? What will be the challenges facing future leaders of this industry?

The concept of leadership is a major issue of debate in the hospitality industry. Today’s hospitality sector is influenced by contemporary world complexities that relate to economic, cultural, social, and environmental dimensions. The business environment in which hospitality firms operate has turned to be highly competitive, and this requires the companies to establish unique strategies of consistently gaining a competitive advantage against rivals (Abbasiyannejad & Silong, 2015). Leadership influences organizational performance. In this regard, workforce diversity is a major contemporary leadership issue in the hospitality industry of today. Workforce diversity entails the employment of employees whose knowledge, age, gender, race, and cultural backgrounds differ. Enhancing workforce diversity is significant and relevant in the today’s hospitality industry. The essay will explain workforce diversity as a contemporary leadership issue in the hospitality sector and put forth the challenges that face future leaders in this industry.

Enhancing workforce diversity holds key to Australian hospitality industry success. Research shows that high quality staff is a perfect ingredient to hospitality industry success. Leaders of hotels and big restaurants need to ensure that the employees they recruit have age, gender, race, and cultural background diversities in order to boost performance. Employees both the young and aged employees in the hospitality sector ensure skills retention and transfer of innovative ideas from one age group to another (Fassinger, 2008). Recent research shows that most Australian hotels depend on multicultural workforce to maintain their position, sustainability, and competitiveness in the market. The manner in which these employees are treated is an important ingredient towards hotel success. Currently, good employees admire to work for hotels and restaurants that value their efforts, ideas, opinions, and viewpoints. A discriminative, bias, and prejudice environment demotivates and kills employees’ morale to perform. In this perspective, managers have to treat all employees equally.

New research by Saxena has revealed that hotels that embrace diversity of cultures, age, ethnicity, and gender among the workforces succeed in the industry (Saxena, 2014). Enhancing workforce diversity has been proved beneficial to both the company and employees. While workplace personnel form the most important asset of a firm, hospitality industry players generate policies and initiatives of managing workforce in a fair and equitable manner. Employees’ motivation through equal and fair remuneration, promotions, and rewards motivates them to perform better. As a result, creativity and innovation of new ideas is enhanced. The most recent innovations and service improvements in the hospitality sector are a direct reward of embracing workforce diversity (Pitts & Recascino Wise, 2010). Also, talent growth and retention is enhanced for employees have different ideas and opinions that they share with one another. The environment to serve hotel customers is friendly, and this enables companies to thrive.

Benefits of Workforce Diversity

The success of hospitality industry depends on the nature and quality of customer services offered by the employees of a firm. Managing employees’ diversity in terms of expertise greatly contributes to success in customer services. The hospitality industry is mandated to offer customers with 24-7 hour customer services in order to enhance profitability and competitiveness. However, only qualified and diverse workforces are able to achieve this goal. Hospitality industry players understand that effective management of diversity improves customer services. Workforce development in terms of training needs to be fair and equitable to all employees. The proper development of employees’ abilities across all diversities creates a strong base in which they understand varying customers’ base needs; as a result, a competitive advantage is gained. Employees able to communicate across cultures understand customers’ needs easily, hence improved quality of customers services.

In this contemporary business environment, successful management of workforce leads to improved creativity, innovation, decision making, and problem solving in the hospitality sector. Team effectiveness depends on the diversity employed by the leadership when forming the groups. Embracing workplace diversity in terms of age and race establishes a unique experience in the hospitality industry since employees freely interact, socialize, and share ideas that lead to new innovations (Garnero, Kampelmann, & Rycx, 2014). For instance, the innovation of online booking for food and accommodation in the industry succeeded after intense consultations among different employees of diverse skills, experiences, and cultural backgrounds. Important to note, the technologies updated and used in hotels have helped in creativity and innovation of employees. International hospitality players benefit greatly on workforce diversity since migrants overflow in these hotels and some of the customers prefer to be served by people from their national origin (Syed & Kramar, 2009). In this regard, the management makes a decision on the employees to welcome new visitors from different companies in order to boost sales.

Also, the success in hospitality industry entails effective management of hospitality services. The most common hospitality services include tourist services, visitor attractions, holiday parks, accommodation, catering services, and club membership. Recent research in Australia suggests that the industry offers a variety of jobs in restaurants, hotels, and cafes. Being a competitive industry, where customers prefer to visit the only companies offering top quality services- enhancing employees’ diversity is mandatory (Steers, Sanchez-Runde & Nardon, 2012). Equity and fairness is required when employing these employees by the HR departments. The language of employees is a major issue of concern, and greatly impacts on the performance of a company. The human resource management is required to be sensitive and keen on the skills, talents, attributes, values, ethics, and professionalism of employees before hiring them. Issues of racial, gender, age, and ethnic prejudice need to be avoided in the selection process.

Workforce Diversity and Customer Services

The best strategy of differentiating services effectiveness in the hospitality industry is valuing employees. Valuing workforce diversity motivates and encourages employees to create and increase more value to the industry by offering more advanced services to customers, visitors, and guests (Wrench, 2016). A strong reputation in the industry is built by the quality of services employees provide to the target customers. Diverse staff management strategies need to be inclusive, fair, and equitable to all diversities in terms of age, sex, race, and ethnicity (Okoro & Washington, 2012). In this doing, a company keeps guests happy, and this increases its reputation in the industry. Staff from diverse backgrounds helps in resolving the challenge of lack of proficiency when communicating to customers from varying backgrounds, and this makes it easy in communicating with the guests.

However; hotels, cafes, and restaurants have updated technologies and tried to minimize costs by all means, but recruiting the best out of staff remains a challenge for most players in this sector (Pitts, 2009). In this regard, future leaders will be facing various challenges of workforce diversity as they endeavor to operate in the hospitality industry.

To begin with, conflict of interest among genders, ethnicities, age groups, and races have the potential to pose dire problems to future leadership and management of workforce diversity in the hospitality industry. Even today, some managers and supervisors show lack of confidence among team members; and keep on rotating them from customer care, waitress, cashiers, chef, and other departments of the company (Jonsen et al., 2013). Racial prejudices in the global arena due to differences in color also pose a major threat to performance and success of future managers in the hospitality industry. Also, the perception by some hospitality managers that the ideas, viewpoints, and perceptions of junior staff are wrong and irrelevant in decision making holds a huge potential to conflicts among the staff and management. In future, if this distrust and lack of confidence among team members by the managers persist; productivity and service delivery will go down.

Another potential challenge to hospitality managers in this sector is inability to cope with technological demands in the market. Guests, visitors, and customers are demanding high quality services and innovations in terms of accommodations, foods, and other services. In this regard, competitors invest in new technologies to improve service delivery to customers hence increased competitiveness in the market (Greene& Kirton, 2015). In particular, digital interaction between the companies and the customers worry most of managers in this industry. It is projected that by 2030, customers will demand prompt response and delivery for their requests and offers no matter the means they use in contacting a restaurant or hotel. The problem will arise since most competing firms will be investing more in new technologies and getting more technologically diverse at the expense of employees.

Challenges to Managing Workforce Diversity

Also, resistance to change is another workforce diversity challenge that will give future leaders headache in the hospitality sector. Until today, some hospitality companies have not accepted diversity of workforce in the workplace. As a result, there is bias, discrimination, and prejudice when hiring new employees in the industry (Herring, 2009). In this doing, unethical, untidy, and unprofessional hotel servants are employed. At the same time, other hospitality companies are getting more diverse in terms of workforce. There is a huge gap created between these two instances. In this regard, any leader employed in a company that has been resistant to workplace diversity changes and wishes to introduce the change will find it difficult to achieve this goal. At the end, the companies will lose competitiveness in the industry hence failure.

Further, negative attitudes and harassment in the workplace provokes danger to future leadership and management in the hospitality industry. Future leaders will find it difficult to alleviate the negative attitudes and perceptions formed against a certain gender, ethnic group, and race by the present leaders since this has been the norm (Deckard, 2009). Harassment of employees will lead to mass resignation, poor customers’ services, damaged market reputation, and lose of competitive power by such hospitality companies in the market. Where a company has not been valuing the disabled employees, this will be difficult to change- hence provoking negative performance of the industry.

Additionally, wage rate and structure of compensating employees in the hospitality industry will also be a major concern and problem to future leaders. Due to technological advancements and investment of huge capital outlay in technologies, setting a wage structure that is favorable and acceptable to all diverse workforces will be difficult (Cherry & Jacob, 2016). The increased demand of quality services forces companies to invest in modern hospitality technology, and most diverse workforces have been highly creative and innovative. Setting the right and acceptable rewards to them is a major headache, since even the selection of the most profitable and viable innovation is also difficult to the leaders. The wage structure in this sense is difficult to design.

Furthermore, changing laws and regulations by the government about workplace diversity and performance of business operations in the hospitality industry also remain a potential threat to future managers of this sector. Future hospitality industry leaders will be coupled with hostile government laws that interfere with internal human resource policies about employees’ recruitment, selection, and hiring. For example, minimum wage rage might be set at a level that not all industry operators will be able to meet due to market forces. Also, other policies that require gender rule might interfere with the performance and operations of the industry (Bolden, 2016). In this regard, future leaders will find it difficult to manage finances especially when rewarding top performers. Other policies that cut across the entire sector set by the government will also interfere with the future leaders’ policies and strategies of enhancing workforce diversity and equity in the workplace.

Conflict of Interest

In conclusion, workforce diversity plays a major role in boosting organizational performance. Embracing age, gender, racial, academic, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds helps in enhancing workforce diversity in an organization. Workforce diversity enhances capacity development, talent retention, creativity and innovation, and improved employees morale hence increasing performance in all dimensions. In particular, the hospitality industry greatly benefit from workforce diversity through improved quality of customers services and delivery of instant 24-7 customer support hence improving productivity of a company. The increased competitiveness in the industry requires all hospitality companies to embrace diversity in the workplace so as to boost performance, competitiveness and sustainability in the market. However, due to resistance to change, diversity conflicts, discrimination, and harassment; the future of hospitality industry management is threatened. Therefore, hospitality managers should embrace total workforce diversity in the workplace so as to boost talent retention, creativity and innovation, as well as overall performance and competitiveness in the industry.

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