West Indies Yacht Club Resort

To: Jim Johnson, General manager, West Indies Yacht Club Resort

From: Patrick Dowd, Management consultant, Dowd's Consultancy

Date: 4th November 2017

Subject: Recommendation to improve motivation of employees and relieve tension between local staffs and US expatriate at West Indies Yacht Club

1. Introduction

This report provides recommendation to reinforce motivation of local BVI staff and relieve tension between them and US managers, affiliated with enhancing customers’ satisfaction. It proposes actions to take with compensation scheme and training programs.

The general manager is concerned about the tension in workplace and the passive attitude of local staff due to exponentially increased customers complaints and high turnover rate of managers.  He requested Dowd's Consultancy to investigate the severity of current problems, and how to solve them to improve management efficiency of WIYC by 2019.

Dowd’s Consultancy undertook this report on 4th September 2017.  We carried out an on-the-spot investigation for 1 week and surveyed 98 participants (48 BVI staffs, 44 guests, 6 managers). We reinforced the findings by having in-depth conversation with 8 participants.

This report provides detailed observations of the current problems including low employee motivation, high tension in workplace and insufficient service quality. Training and new rewarding scheme are provided to improving managerial efficiency. Due to one-week time frame, we only interviewed 48 BVI staffs. All the questionnaires distributed were completed.

This report provides the conclusions, recommendations and findings.

1. Conclusion

Based on the observation and survey at West Indies Yacht Club, we agreed the current management style and rewarding policies are insufficient to improve employee motivation and relieve workplace tension.  The resort has:

1. Rewarding local staffs for monetary benefits, but ignore their authentic need
2. Training US expatriates little on management and culture
3. Providing not enough instructions a work standards for local staffs
4. Limiting the time managers spend in the resort, cause rare communication chances between managers and local staffs

1. Recommendations

As the efficient and high-quality services should base on harmony workplace and competent staffs or managers, we recommend the resort to:

1. Set up a new compensation system to create incentives for local staffs, but the reward should base on evaluation scheme to maintain fairness. The staff evaluation should consider views from diverse crowds (staffs, customers and managers) and opinions from expatriates may weight greater in the scheme. The rewards can focus more on non-monetary benefits like paid leaves or annual body-check for staff and their immediate relatives. Moreover, overnights family vacation in the resort can be provided to who performed well.

The resort may start the new compensation scheme within the next month.

1. Provide compulsory training programs for both BVI staffs and managers to improve skills and relationships, details are as follow:

1. Culture and management training for US expatriates to understand the way to motivate or instruct staffs with different culture background. This could be done through monthly online training courses customized by Dale Carnegie Training Company which did several managerial trainings among Caribbean before.
2. Skills and hospitality training for BVI staffs to learn the standardized details of work and to provide services with proactive attitude.  The training should include comprehensive instructions of their work and safety training to prevent injuries of both staffs and guests. The managers can take in charge of training twice a month during the slow seasons (June-September) to provide better guidance to their staffs.
3. Team building camp for both staffs and expatriates to increasing mutual understanding or building trust. This camp may be held semi-annually by SMART Caribbean Company who provides relatively low cost and good word-of-mouth.

1. Findings and Analyses

In the past two years the increasing gap between local employees and US expatriates led to several problems including high manager turnover rate and low motivation of staffs.

Through 1 week observation, we founded local staffs are not willing to work harder for extra tips, instead they would rather enjoy their working time with friends. Also, the questionnaire data revealed that 70% of staffs ranked relationship and family at the first place, but only 14% choose money. Both observations and data showed that, for local employees, extra time with family seems to be more attractive than tips or bonus. When company care about work-life balance of their staff, the staffs will devote more to the company (Marshall,2005). However, even staffs showed their strong preferences on non-monetary rewards, there were few welfare or paid leave in current rewarding system.