Manpower shortage in the hospitality industry
The hospitality industry in Sri Lanka has just begun to come of age as a mainstream socio-economic sector, with recognition of its job creating importance. What is relevant today however is the fact that our industry needs to adapt and evolve perhaps more rapidly than other industries. Why? First - the hotel industry has always been largely reliant on an agile and nimble workforce who can endure the long and at times anti-social hours. Second - the pace of change at which the client base uses technology to make informed decisions fuels the need to ensure employees are “fluent” in the same language as the clients.
The challenge for tourism and hospitality businesses lies in up-skilling our people at all levels, and lifting our productivity and profit, so that the industry can attract investors and visitors. However, what we immediately need to do is to ‘bring in’ the necessary numbers to build, sustain and deploy a workforce that can sufficiently fuel the needs of the industry. After all, a hotel without its employees is nothing more than a building with beds. Let’s therefore arouse the interest of sufficiently suitable people so that the industry has the right-minded people to grow and perform at the top of its game. It is not merely a matter of finding people for the work that must be done, but of ensuring that people choose our industry over others, and have their choice confirmed by feeling valued in rewarding jobs with coherent career paths and equitable salaries.
Finding it difficult to attract potentially good people, or unwilling to pay a decent salary, most hotels employ people looking for a job in the hope that they can train them and a little further down the track it either works or it doesn’t - in the majority of cases it simply doesn’t, thus, triggering a decline in standards. Upmarket overseas tourists in particular come to expect high levels of service when they visit Sri Lanka, but the current situation is placing this expectation at risk. That’s not to say that there aren't really good staff, but if you look at the total workforce I think we've got a critical mass of hotel employees, who are either very inexperienced, attitudinally indifferent or are plateauing. Furthermore, there is still a lack of understanding of the ‘worth' of staff. One suspects that it is more an unwillingness to recognise it and/or a reluctance to dilute the ‘bottom-line’. There are still employers who pay poorly for lower level staff and rely on the 'service charge and tip' system to bolster employees’ remuneration. Hence people tend to regard the ‘lower end' jobs in hospitality as ‘stop-gap employment’. The industry will not gain the respect it seeks unlike that enjoyed in other sectors, until the financial rewards demonstrate the employees' value'. We need to invest in people going into hospitality and the industry as a whole needs to look at why people are joining the industry and then leaving, or failing to opt in at all.
An 18 year old cook working with a 43 year old sous-chef, a 54 year old housekeeping supervisor working with a 22 year old room attendant, A 32 year old front desk manager, working with a 47 year old reservation associate - these are all realities within the hotel and hospitality sector, where multigenerational teams need to work effectively together. All four generations are in the workplace (Traditionalists, Baby Boomers, Gen Xers and Gen Ys), and often you may have younger generations managing older employees. Andrew Ugarte puts it across very pertinently, when he explains that ‘To continue encouraging young people to join the hospitality and tourism, the industry needs to change to meet expectations of upcoming generations. Jobs may have to be tailored to accommodate Generation Y employees’ personal lives — not the other way around. While Baby Boomers and Gen X have more fixed ideas about traditional work hours, Gen Y is more inclined to blur the lines between work and non-work’. He goes on to add, ‘Hospitality is a customer service driven industry, where employees need a welcoming manner and appearance. As a largely online generation, with less face-to-face experience than the generations before them, Gen Y can sometimes struggle to project an appropriate manner or achieve the level of grooming and appearance expected from many employers.’ The situation in Sri Lanka is no different – if not more problematic, when one considers the ‘English’ proficiency inadequacy factor, especially in the frontlines.
Shafeek Wahab – Editor, Hospitality Sri Lanka, Consultant, Trainer, Ex-Hotelier
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