Too much bureaucracy can cause staff attrition
Businesses across the service industry spectrum report employee retention as both problematic and costly. This is not a new phenomenon. It began a long time before the pandemic. The reason an employee decides to leave an organization varies. Commonly perceived factors include better compensation packages offered by another company,, a deficiency of trust and openness in the current place of work and dormant growth opportunities in the existing job.
Employees will stay with an organization if given a combination of retention strategies that can make leaving seem less than advantageous. Consequently, reducing the number of employees who leave an organization is a top management priority. Unfortunately, most managers have either not addressed the problem of employee retention or have attempted to address the problem with little success.
On top of all these factors, the problem intensified in Sri Lanka after the onset of a civil war, in the 1980’s where hotel staff exited in large numbers to the Middle East. Many went there seeking a job for a short tenure, to make some extra cash and gain international experience, Working in the Middle East not only offered several opportunities to build their CV, but also came with benefits on top of the salary. With housing, commute, meals and sometimes even the flights covered, they had the potential to start a new life.
Aggravating the situation further was the fact that many of the island’s hotels (internationally or locally operated) employed managers and heads of departments, who espoused a bureaucratic leadership style. A bureaucratic leadership style depresses creativity and does not encourage diverse ideas from others. Such leaders reject outside input to the point of alienating employees.
Bureaucracy has its origins in good intentions. It is predictable and accountable, but these traits also make them change-resistant. Leaders and employees in bureaucracies gravitate to this type of culture because that’s where they feel comfortable, and change is viewed as a threat to the stability of the status quo.
I recall the time I was working at a 5-star International hotel in Colombo, where the Financial Controller demanded stringent compliance to a set of rigid rules and regulations as determined by him. My colleague, the F & B director complained once of a situation where he had asked the manager of the hotel’s pastry shop to obtain the recipe costs for the new Healthy /Smoothie juices menu, (which had 17 offerings), from the F & B controller. The manager after spending some time, meticulously typing out the ingredients with exact quantities / measurements for each beverage type, took it to the controller with a signed letter of request.
The F & B controller had flatly refused to accept it. Instead, he gave the manager 17 forms to fill-up, each of which had then to be signed by the manager and the F & B director respectively. Only then would he begin work on finding out the exact recipe cost for each smoothie / juice. This is a classic example of bureaucratic rigidity, where organisations lose lots of bright young people – especially in an age of fluidity.
Procedures and processes are put in place to ensure consistency and so people know exactly what needs to be done and how to do it in any situation. A process is like a recipe for making a soup, which we'd all agree is helpful and reasonable. This can help up to a point, but can be extremely frustrating when the processes are not reviewed and updated often enough. By the way, the young manager didn’t stay long with us. End of story.
Everything needs to be "approved" by someone (or many people) in case their department is affected by what others are doing, even when done as an improvement. Someone abuses "good judgment" once and instead of dealing with the instance of bad judgment, a policy gets put in place to prevent that situation from ever occurring in the future. It is a form of penalizing everyone because one or two employees failed to abide by the rules. There's no balance between "good judgment" and "following the process”.
Policies and procedures should not tie down high wages personal to their desks - especially those in customer-facing operational areas, thus diverting their core focus on what’s happening on the floor.
Shafeek Wahab – Editor, Hospitality Sri Lanka, Consultant, Trainer, Ex-Hotelier
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