Questioning Role

As we realized the turnover rate in our company was getting higher and the number of workers who were showing intentions to leave had increased throughout the times, we took an initiative to do some researches on solving similar organizational problems. We managed to find out some organizations that had gone through the similar problems in the past, XinHua Hotel and Aiya Restaurant.

Based on past researches, job satisfaction is shown to be strongly and inversely related to employee’s intention to leave an organization (Egan, Yang & Bartlett, 2004; Lambert, Hogan & Barton, 2001; MacIntosh & Doherty, 2010; Schwepker, 2001; Silverthorne, 2004). Job satisfaction is defined as how contented employees are with their jobs and thus plays an important role in retaining employees. To an extent, employee job satisfaction is a reflection of how well an employee’s expectations of a job are aligned with the reality of their work (Lund, 2003). Therefore, factors associated with job satisfaction need to be studied. Employees assess job satisfaction based on intrinsic elements such as purpose of the job as well as extrinsic elements such as compensation and job benefits.

A research on employee turnover at XinHua Hotel in Taiwan showed that payments and benefits were considered as the most important aspect contributing to job satisfaction. Employees of Xin Hua Hotel were not satisfied with their monetary rewards and as a result chose to leave the organization. They felt that they were under-appreciated in terms of payment. In this case, the management of XinHua Hotel solved this problem by setting clear guidelines in which employees will be given monetary rewards according to their contributions. Secondly, they also built up benefit-share program to allow the employees to purchase the company’s stock. Therefore, employees who purchased the stock will become shareholders and feel like they own part of the organization. The next factor of high employee turnover in hotel is because the wrong employees were hired to do the job. These employees were not motivated to continue working because they were not a good “fit” with the culture of the hotel. This meant that their values, principles and goals did not match those of the hotel. The Management of XinHua Hotel changed their strategy by conducting job analysis to identify the specific requirement of the employees to be hired. By doing this, they managed to identify and hire the right person for the tasks.

Aiya Restaurant is a newly opened restaurant chain in Vietnam which aims to advertise a young and energetic atmosphere. Aiya Restaurant hired a lot of young students as part time waiters and waitresses.  Thus, the Human Resource department of Aiya restaurant is always under pressure of high turnover rate. They are faced with a high frequency of employees leaving the restaurant every month. In order to cope with this problem, Aiya had come up with both monetary incentives and non-monetary incentives systems. For example, the performance of the employees will be evaluated at the end of the month based on the quality of work done, time needed to get work done, their working attitude, the compliance with regulations, and their proactive and creativity level. Those who performed well will be given better yearly extra compensation. However, according to the research, employees at Aiya Restaurant felt that non-monetary incentives such as employee discounts and extra holidays were favorable. Another prominent non-monetary incentive such as promotion opportunities and opportunities to experience new things was also deemed important because majority of the workers are students. These students value flexible working hours as they consider the job to be part-time and temporary. Furthermore, another aspect in retaining employees of the restaurant is by building relationships between supervisor and employees. The supervisors of Aiya Restaurant began to trust and understand the employees. They also started to communicate their opinions to their employees by giving constructive feedback. Encouragements and compliments were also given from time to time to show them that their efforts are being appreciated.