Essay
Overview
The employees and staff of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel are locals. Because majority of them are inexperienced in terms of working in a five-star hotel, they mostly lack the skills, knowledge, and attitudes needed to serve customers of Ritz-Carlton hotel. On the contrary, the managerial personnel are experienced, competent, and trained, having a hotel management degree and a comprehensive five-star hotel training prior to working in Ritz-Carlton Hotel. However, they discovered that their housekeeping, kitchen, lobby, and front office personnel lack any formal education or training in their jobs. The managerial personnel hence encountered difficulties in giving them appropriate directions. The employees were unable to satisfy the high expectations of the hotel's customers, who evaluated the services at Ritz-Carlton Hotel against other prestigious hotels. Repeatedly, there has been a growing incidence of complaints and dissatisfaction over restaurant services, housekeeping, and overall cleanliness. In this case, a comprehensive training program for employees and staff of Ritz-Carlton Hotel is greatly recommended.
Evaluation of Training Needs
When evaluating training needs, especially as regards employee competency, a gap analysis, which requires a comparison of performance with established desired competencies through objective testing, peer evaluation, or self-evaluation, is highly useful (Guerra-Lopez, 2012). Three evaluation methods, modeled after the hospitality management competencies framework, are used to evaluate training needs-- peer evaluation method, direct supervisor evaluation method, and self-evaluation method. The integrated outcomes of the three methods reveal the trainees' performance in every competence-based inventory.
Performance Management Schemes
The above-mentioned competence-based evaluation methods are suitable to the performance management schemes of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, which identify financial performance and competitiveness as outcome indicators that are based on determinant indicators which center on factors, operations, and activities needed to attain the hotel's strategic goals. The success of Ritz-Carlton Hotel is made possible by both non-financial and financial aspects. The hotel is categorized under the service industry and, thus, the quality of customer services is highly crucial and vital to the hotel's continued success. In consequence, customer satisfaction occupies the top priority of the hotel because high customer satisfaction implies a higher number of customers in the future. Therefore, the hotel needs to take into full consideration non-financial indicators such as innovation and quality of services.
Incentives
One of the contributing factors to the success of the outcomes of the evaluation methods will be positive reinforcement or incentives. In order for the training to succeed, trainees must be motivated through non-financial methods, such as encouraging them to set challenging but achievable goals. Psychological studies on goal setting have clearly demonstrated that establishing challenging, clear-cut, and decisive goals results in better performance than do simple or ambiguous goals (Aamodt, 2015). Hence, Ritz-Carlton must complement clear-cut, challenging goals with financial incentives in order to fully motivate high performance from its employees and staff.
The Training Plan
In addition, the capabilities, knowledge, and skills acquired from the training program must be evaluated. So as to assess a training program, the goals themselves must be considered, and furthermore to assess whether they are still the original goals and whether they have been successfully achieved. Through such procedure, there must be an assessment not merely of what the trainees gained, but also of how they gained (in knowledge and experience). Moreover, through the analysis of the effects of training on the issues or problems faced by the hotel, the training needs can be assessed.
References
Aamodt, M. (2015). Industrial/organizational psychology: an applied approach. Mason, OH: Cengage Learning.
Guerra-Lopez, I. (2012). Performance evaluation: proven approaches for improving program and organizational performance. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons.
