The sixth in our series of challenges that face the Hospitality industry looks at Culture & Ethics in the workplace. Learn how fostering a healthy work environment helps both your bottom line and overall turnover rates in your hospitality business.
The Importance of Prioritising Work Ethics in Your Business
Unethical business practices and an unhealthy culture will inevitably damage your brand, workforce, and future viability. The hospitality industry with rotating shifts and little routine, constantly working with different people every single day, can lead to lack of empathy and care towards one another.
This can lead to many issues that could be avoided, such as:
☆ Harassment
☆ Lack of empathy
☆ No care towards one another
☆ Bad customer service
☆ High absence quota
☆ Increased turnover rates
HR must take harassment accusations and bad working culture seriously along with other ethical issues commonly found in the industry. Between harassment, theft, internet abuse by employees, and a wide variety of other problems, HR in hospitality must find ways to continually track these issues while showing their employees a level of trust- which is a fine line to not overstep.
Key to Success: Supporting Technology
HR software is not here to make your life harder and more complex. It is here to make managing your workforce so much easier on you. The larger the organisation, the more difficult it can be for HR to monitor a larger workforce so, in such an environment, utilising technology to keep a constant pulse on the workforce is imperative to identify trends before they could become systemic problems and damage the ever-important workplace culture.
Fostering Common Ethics Is Not Something To Be Overlooked
Ethics is important for the wellbeing of an organisation. It determines the effectiveness of an organisation and its operations. In the hospitality industry, ethical practices help to avoid issues such as racial conflicts, cultural differences, gender troubles and dishonesty among others.
There exists a link between common work ethics and employee performance. Most organisations take ethics as just another set of regulation. Incorporating common work ethics is in an organisation is fundamental in sustaining projected growth and eventual optimal performance of that organisation.
The essence of ethical behavior is shared across cultures of the world. It is important for the business to foster common ethics to get the best of the workforce. Staff is quite sensitive to unethical behavior touching on their welfare. Issues such as favoritism in staff recruitment, remuneration, promotion, allocation of duties etc, do have a lasting negative effect on staff performance. To enhance staff performance, businesses should always strive to put in place a clear company policy.
Policies Are The Way Forward
Hospitality administration needs to put policies in place to try as much as possible to be transparent in allocation of duties. A business must believe that it is important in supporting employee’s ethical growth. In supporting employees, administration shows employee’s that they are willing to go that extra mile in understanding their employees in tandem with the organisation’s culture.
Of great concern is the fact that absence of policies in any organisation eats away into its core profitability. This can be caused due to bad customer service standards as every employee follows their own rules.
Whenever there is a strong shared work ethic in an organisation, this is mostly due to set policies that are followed across the board. It actually projects a strong message that the establishment holds onto strong values and pride & customers will notice it.
Fostering a great working culture in hospitality will pay off, if you just give it the attention it needs to show its effects.
This post was written by Novative. They are an exhibitor on the HRTech247 Payroll, Time & Attendance floor in the Technology Hall here.
