Assignment task: individual reflective essay
you are required to write a reflective analysis of the issues discussed in your report and in two of the other presentations. Guidelines for the analysis will be posted on the course site.
Due: Wednesday 31 May, electronic submission by 11.55pm
Length: 1000 words
Weighting: 50%
Criteria used in the assessment of the reflection
clear demonstration of insight into the issues identified by the groups;
appropriate and effective use of the selected examples;
degree of evaluation of learning and how that learning can affect personal and/or workplace practice;
clear and concise writing style, correct spelling and grammar, and
correct use of the Harvard system of citation.
You have you write how this course and the case study has helped you and what you learned from it.
About the course:
The aim of this course is to provide you with knowledge, key concepts, and practices relating to the management of people in organisational settings from diverse perspectives. Students will be guided to develop their skills in critical thinking, analytical report writing, communication, and active participation in discussions about current issues relating to managing people.
Topics pertaining to managing people through a competing values framework link issues such as creating and sustaining commitment and cohesion, communication, establishing and maintaining stability and continuity, improving productivity and increasing profitability, promoting change and encouraging adaptability, and mastery of managing people.
Through a critical thinking and diversity approach this course prepares future managers to demonstrate a heightened self-awareness of individual and group competencies required to manage people effectively. Students will acquire a body of knowledge reflecting quality academic research in a business report. Through self-analysis they will develop a plan for continuous self-mastery.
What I would get from this course:
completion of this course you will be able to:
Synthesise a body of knowledge that includes the understanding of recent developments in the field of managing people.
Utilise cognitive and communication skills that demonstrate your mastery of theoretical knowledge and critical reflection on theory and professional practice.
Apply creativity and initiative to new situations in professional practice and further learning.
Demonstrate a high level of personal autonomy and accountability in your professional practice.
Report:
Executive Summary:
Any organisation is made up of people. And these people provide the organisation with leadership and other qualities. According to Warrigon, ‘it is the people who make things happen in all organisations’.
In many organisations, people are not treated well or often taken for granted by their managers. Commonly, we don’t find managers or leaders who are responsible for the organisations success. It is an art to motivate people in the organisations which now is missing in many of the managers. The organisations keep focusing on the business enhancements and forget to focus on motivating its workers who are responsible for the success of any organisation.
Objectives:
Give functional learning.
To build up an inventive and sensible considering.
To give a superior comprehension of the subject by making at more fascinating and pragmatic situated.
To enhance analysing expertise which help them in taking right choices and to accomplish the given target.
Introduction:
Managing people at organisations would be easy if all the staff members and employees you are managing are hardworking, co-operative and work with a great attitude. But managing such people wouldn’t be called as management. It would lounge around doing some little work and highly energetic individuals worked well and persistently. But the reality is different than this. In any organisation managing some people is difficult whereas managing some is very easy. This is because every organisation has different kinds of workers with different personalities and different talents. So, it very important for managers to manage everyone, individually.
In this report, we are dealing with the study of cleaners at a Finnish Hotel. In this case, there were issues with the working conditions and misbehaviour in organisation, but no actions were taken. Few of the issues were related to communication and which made difficult to meet and discuss or share things. (Lundberg and Ch. Karlson, 2016)
Managers need to be a team-player. Employees don’t want only professional expertise and experience. They are also looking for other qualities like character traits for building rapport with customers and co-workers, interpersonal skills and communication skills that will help them stay a team effectively. (Michelman, 2017)
Managers need to be assertive.
They must know how to explain the team-members why they need to do certain things.
They should be open to suggestions
Always accept responsibility for their decisions.
Key Issues:
In the cases study, we will see what issues the hotel attendants faced and how their dignity was threatened by the working conditions and how they misbehaved as a reaction to those issues.
Issues relating to hotel cleaners:
Communication barriers:
The cleaners don’t understand each other’s language and every few understand English. And so, it gets difficult to communicate. The cleaners try to communicate with each other using sign language. But even that leads to misunderstandings. (Lipman, 2017)
Cultural barriers:
The cleaners belong to different cultures, and therefore, the ethnic and social backgrounds differ from cleaner to cleaner. And as result of these cultural differences, there is no scope for developing deep relations amongst them as there are no common denominators. (Lipman, 2017)
Issues relating to Hotel cleaning:
Different timings:
The cleaners get the details of their daily schedule every morning. Every cleaner gets different rooms. So, every cleaner finishes his/her job at different timings. It depends on how fast you finish off your work. Also, the job is same every day. This makes the job monotonous as well as boring for the cleaners. (Lundberg and Ch. Karlson, 2016)
Products run out quickly from the trolleys-
Products like toiletries, coffee bags, towels, products from minibar, etc. are expected to refilled or replaced daily. Every floor has two trolleys. The products run out quickly from the trolleys. So, the cleaners have to get the products from the storeroom. Also, the storeroom is not well maintained. The products are difficult to find. So, time and efforts are wasted in this task as the cleaners keep running in lifts to get the trolleys refilled. (Lundberg and Ch. Karlson, 2016)
Working fast is mandatory:
The rules and regulations are controlled by the management. The cleaners are expected to work faster and are not expected to miss any detail while cleaning. This creates a pressure on the workers to work against clock. (Wilson, 2013)The workers are not even expected to take lunch breaks during the working hours. The work pressure is much higher which creates health issues for the cleaners. The cleaners often complain about back pain or shoulder ache due to stress and heavy load of work. Moreover, the cleaners do not make any extra money after keeping up with the expected time efficiency. (Lundberg and Ch. Karlson, 2016)
No right to expression:
The cleaners should agree with everything the manager asks for. They do not have the right to express any criticism or dissatisfaction. And if they do, they often get punished for criticising. So, the cleaners prefer hiding their views and feelings for staying away from punishments. (Lundberg and Ch. Karlson, 2016)
Fiddling and stealing:
The work environment is always closed. Also, the communication between the workers is defective. As the cleaners are aware of the punishments for criticising, they simply think that the solution to solve the problem is by cheating. The cleaning is not done as much carefully as it is expected and they also break the management directions. And if they are caught, they must do it again.
Also, the workers engage in stealing hotel supplies. They consider stealing as a game which adds a bit of fun in their threatening working conditions.
Work pressure:
The cleaners always had a pressure to work against the clock. The workers had a formal right to take a lunch break. But, they were not expected to take one. Because taking breaks deducted their payment. So, the cleaners did not take any breaks during their work. Also, because of this they did not get time to interact with each other. So, because of continuous work and no breaks, the cleaners suffered from health issues like back pain or shoulder pain. And after taking so much stress and working under so much pressure, they did not make any extra money. the cleaners were expected to work faster and effectively which gave them a constant stress. And if they do work according to the time-frame, they often get punished. (Wilson, 2013)
Effects on employees:
Communication:
The use of sign language lead to misunderstanding and miscommunication amongst the cleaners. Also, the cleaners did not have time to talk with each other. They were not able to share their views and feelings. Also, the cleaners came from different cultural backgrounds. So, these cultural differences there was no scope for developing deeper relations amongst them. (Lipman, 2017)
Products run out quickly:
Cleaners often noticed that when customers’ check-out from the hotel, the hotel supplies and items from minibar went missing. Or even the customers asked for more supplies very frequently. So, every day the cleaners had to refill the items. Every floor had two trolleys of hotel supplies which was clearly not enough for every floor. So, every time they ran out of products they had to run all the way to the storerooms to refill their trolleys. This was time consuming as well as required more efforts. Also, the storerooms were messy and not maintained properly. So, the cleaners had to look for items every time. (The challenges of managing people, 2017)
Reduced Productivity:
As the cleaners were not clearly told what they were expected to do and in what way, the levels of productivity started decreasing. The cleaners started cheating and finding way to reduce work. (Deeb, 2017)
Poor work performance:
The management needs to set performance standards and should follow up with reviews from all the staff members. But, criticism was not welcomed at this hotel. The cleaners did not have the right to express any kind of criticism or give any suggestions or comments on anything. Because of this, the cleaners did not feel appreciated or feel that they were given the importance they deserved. Thus, the cleaners preferred not expressing their views. And as the cleaners never expressed their views or suggestions, it got difficult for management to understand the cleaner’s problems. And hence, it resulted in poor work performance. (Deeb, 2017)
Stealing and fiddling:
The cleaners had different work timings. And, they were not expected to take lunch breaks. So, the cleaner did not get time to interact with each other. And the work pattern remained same every day for every cleaner. Like, every cleaner was expected to do rooms in same way and same manner every day. So, the job was getting boring and repetitious. Thus, the cleaners found their own ways to make their work interesting and enjoyable. The cleaners started stealing the hotel supplies and liquor from the minibars. This stealing was like a positive attribute in doing their boring jobs. (Karlsson, 2014)
Low morale:
The cleaners were never motivated by their managers. As low levels of motivation result in low employee morale. The managers or the supervisors neither paid attention to the cleaners needs nor did they tried to understand their issues. So, this made it difficult for the cleaners to balance their work duties and personal life. This is a result of lack of motivation from the supervisors. (D. Warigon, n.d.)
Solutions:
For communication and cultural issues:
It is very important to create work environment including the cultural diversity. This is great challenge as including this cultural diversity instead of excluding it so that every employee can achieve their potentials. It is the manager’s responsibility to understand where these language or cultural diversity can favour and where they cannot. Moreover, the managers must work on these differences so that they can help their employees and achieve greater outcomes. (Joseph, 2017).
Managers could appoint a mediator for the employees so that they can converse about the important things.
Managers could arrange training sessions for the cleaners where they could learn to interact or learn methods of telling or showing things to each other.
Providing language classes for cleaners where they can learn at least the basics of a few language.
Also, it is very important to understand that language plays a very important role while working. So, when hiring any employee, it is important to determine language attribute as a requirement of the job. So, that employees can communicate and develop relations.
Also, the managers should associate the cleaners of same age together so that, at least they share same views about work or other things. (Whitmore and more, 2017)
Interactive activities:
Social climate at the company was very restricted and closed and the communication between the cleaners and their supervisors was very defective. This created an unhealthy and bad work environment for the cleaners. There were other reasons also. Like the cleaners were not paid enough, there was a constant work pressure to finish the work at defined time and the cleaners did not get a say in anything. This behaviour demotivated the cleaners and made their work uninteresting. (Clifford and more, 2017)
As the company, did not welcome any suggestions or criticism from the cleaners, the cleaners started fiddling with their work. They started cheating and struggled between fiddling work and management’s control on their job. So, it was necessary to factor an element of fun into work to create a highly motivated and enthusiastic environment to cleaners. Because of this, employees become complacent and satisfied with their monotonous jobs. As the job of cleaners is boring and same every day, cleaners show lesser commitment and feel like there is no fun involved. The managers and supervisors as well as the cleaners must be interactive and must have a good sense of humour so that the work is enjoyable and productive. The managers must also arrange a few fun activities or sessions for the staff so that they get to interact with each other and feel refreshed. (Karlsson, 2014)
Proper Management:
The cleaners often complained about the hotel supplies being missing from the room or from the minibar. It is obvious that the customers take the hotel supplies with them while checking out. So, every day the cleaners must refill the supplies. Every floor has two trolleys filled with the hotel supplies which is not enough. So, this problem should be taken into consideration by the management. Also, when they run out of items from the trolley they should go to the storeroom to get the trolley refilled. The cleaners also complained about the storerooms not well managed. Like every time they went to the storeroom they had to look for item as the storeroom was in a mess. And every time running to storeroom wasted a lot of time and efforts as they had to go up and down to get the items. (Lipman, 2016)
Instead of having two trolleys per floor they could have an extra trolley on each floor.
Storerooms should be tidy and well managed so that it is easier for the attendants to find products in place and same time they spend in searching them.
Setting performance standards:
Managers must understand all the strategies, processes and other tools and methods which are required to do any task or work. Also, these tools must be well explained and communicated to the cleaners so that the cleaners get a clear idea of what they are expected to do and in what way it is expected to be done. (D. Warigon, n.d.)
This proper understanding of tools between the manager and the cleaners creates a direct impact on the organisation. but, these tools should be utilised efficiently and effectively to achieve the organisational goals. The manager must train the cleaners or should clearly determine the tasks and show how that task is to be performed. The manager should clearly determine the quality of work they are expecting. (Michelman, 2017)
The cleaners must undergo a training program before they start their job so that the work is done as expected and in the proper way.
Also, the manager must take a note of all the problems, issues or reviews regarding any task and find solutions so that the cleaners find it easy to do.
If the managers fail to do this, the result will be poor work performance from the employees.
Motivating employees:
The art of motivating employees has been practiced since many years. But it is lost a couple of times. This happens when the company is busy focussing on only its business systems and operations to enhance its business. But while doing this, they forget to focus on the main factor that enhances the business that is the employees who work hard to make the business a success. The company must understand that the employees are one of main assets of the company and they are the strength of the company. And so, it is very important for the company to motivate and encourage its employees to maintain a consistent business morale.
The managers didn’t treat the cleaners well and often took them for granted. The managers must understand that they should treat the cleaners with due respect so that the cleaners feel appreciated and a part of the company. Highly motivated cleaners work more efficiently than the non-motivated cleaners. (Adonis, 2017)
The managers must set higher standards for the cleaners. The employees learn from their superiors so the managers should set an example of a great leader for the cleaners.
The cleaners should also be awarded by appraisals and bonuses for their performance. This shows them that they are being appreciated for the work they do. And, it makes them work efficiently and increases their commitment towards work. Even when the company makes profits, the employees must be given credits for their efforts and rewarded for the same. (Working conditions and the health and safety of room attendants in luxury hotels, 2011)
Conclusion:
In conclusion, it is very important to create a motivated organisation and it is of greater challenge for the manager or leader. We all know that highly motivated employees lead to better work performance. And motivating employees is like an art. It comes with creativity, experience, directing, innovation and having faith in the worthiness of people. It is in manager’s hands how he wants the work environment to be. Another thing to remember is that employees that drive the company on the success or failure paths. So, to be on the success path, it is important to build a truly people-based company. And the manager needs to specialise in the art and study of managing people. This helps in creating a high-performance organisation. (Lipman, 2017)