Empowerment at TENFACE
Empowerment moves the
authority and responsibility to make decisions from the supervisor to the line
employees (Kotler 2006). This gives line employees greater control of decision
making and means there is less need to consult senior management regarding
day-to-day decisions. With decisions being made by frontline staff there will
be quicker response times for service delivery and quicker reaction to customer
dissatisfaction.
We achieve empowerment at Tenface as below (Lashley, 1997):
·
Delayering - We removed all middle management layers to boost
communication between corporate management and our self-managed teams on the
frontline. Teams have assigned team leaders whose responsibility it is to
communicate between senior management and frontline.
·
Participation –Team leaders delegate frontline staff and ensure
everyone is included and involved in shared information and decision making. We
help open new networks and alliances and ensure no employee is overlooked or
feels left out of the team.
·
Involvement – By
involving employees in management decisions we encourage input from employees’
and gain from their knowledge, experiences and ideas. Input from all frontline staff is essential to build service quality.
An example would be the team’s joint input to designing staff uniform and for
gathering information on what is hot in Bangkok.
·
Commitment – By making jobs more rewarding we
influence motivation and commitment towards performance. This increases job
satisfaction and increases employee retention. We do this is through team and
individual reward schemes.
Shortcomings of
Empowerment
Empowerment assumes
all employees are the same and can take on increased levels of responsibility.
Some employees may fail to operate in a dynamic environment. Some employees may
abuse their powers or make wrong decisions or costly mistakes e.g. double
bookings. When giving shared responsibility to frontline employees there is
potential for clashes and conflict between delegated decision makers.
There is also risk to
customer satisfaction as customer service may be inconsistent with employees making
differing or wrong decisions. This can lead to some customers feeling treated unfairly e.g. one customer offered a room upgrade while another is
not.
To ensure that
empowerment is successful it will be necessary to implement on-going training
schemes which are costly and tie up investment capital.
Creating Brand
Ambassadors
At Tenface we recognise the strengths of empowering staff and aim to
control potential shortcomings. We do this through rigid recruitment criteria.
We aim to attract best fit employees to be ‘Brand Ambassadors’ at the hotel. Each
employee is a representative of brand image and it is necessary for employees
to reflect the hotel niche. We develop individual characters, capabilities and attitudes and give
employees roles which best suit their
own expertise e.g. ‘Concierge and Entertainment Guru.’ Expertise are shared
through teamwork along with ideas, skills and experiences to creates a flexible
and knowledgeable workforce. These techniques are
essential with high purchasing sophistication in our niche market and create valuable
word-of-mouth advertising from customers.