Hospitality Performance Appraisals

The Importance of a Performance Appraisal System

The hospitality industry, if nothing else, is about people. Providing services to guests who they find hospitable enough to come back again and again requires the best employees that can be hired for a competitive salary.

Recruitment is the starting point, coaching and counselling are the maintenance tools, however, performance appraisals are the development tools.

Performance appraisals are a reality check for subordinate and supervisor to express their thoughts away from the day-to-day activities and frustrations, on how they think the subordinate and in better systems, the supervisor are performing. Coaching and counselling have an impact on isolated performance issues, much like going to the doctor to treat a symptom. An appraisal is more like going to the doctor for a complete health check. None of the symptoms evident since the last check up will be forgotten, but in a thorough check and discussion new issues and opportunities may arise.

A performance appraisal is the time to build a development plan for each employee to make them more valuable than when you hired them and since the last appraisal.

Common Appraisal System Issues

Many Performance Appraisal processes are written as an extension of the company's strategic and planning documentation. That is a mistake. Whilst a Performance Appraisal is clearly a useful tool in a Performance Management System to help execute a strategy or deliver a plan, they should not be an extension of the documentation.

Performance Appraisals should be constructed to influence the performance of a person in the short and medium term. It should be built from what influences people and brought back to support the strategy and the planning assumptions and objectives.

For example, a strategy that relies on achieving 95% guest satisfaction ratings so that the company enters into the zone of customer loyalty should not have achieving 95% guest satisfaction as a performance requirement for individuals. Each individual can only contribute to the achievement of the target, they cannot be held responsible for it..

A Performance Appraisal System could, however, set a job performance requirement for a housekeeper as meeting the minimum standards for room checks 97% of the time. If a proportion of rooms are checked every day in a year, such that all housekeepers’ work is randomly checked about once a fortnight, it will give a statistically valid view of their work. if, say,97% of the time the room check meets all of the standards required such as cleanliness, up-to-date compendium and stocked mini bar then we know that the housekeeper is contributing to our strategic objective of a 95% customer satisfaction level

Another common error in appraisal systems in the hospitality industry is the over-reliance on cascading down values through the appraisal system. cascading down a "Values" label such as "Customer centric" to an appraisal document creates a cottage industry in informally determining what customer centric means to each supervisor and manager in each department. It is much better to determine what job performance requirement in a particular role would make customers perceive that they are central to all our decision making.

For example, telling an accounts payable clerk they have to be customer centric will start a non-sensical thought process off which will alternate between internal customers, external customers and vendors in an effort to determine who the "customer" is. If we told them instead that they have to pay 90% of all invoices by the due date and ensure that zero percent of all supply disruptions came about for non-payment of invoices. That would ensure a customer never went without a product or service because we did not pay our bills on time.

How Should an Appraisal System for the Hospitality Industry be Designed?

Appraisal systems should consist of five parts:

1. The employee's view of their performance
2. The supervisor's view of the employee’s performance
3. The goals for the employee for the next review period
4. The development plan for the employee
5. The performance requirements for the next review period

The review of performance should consider the six following independent variables of performance:

1. Has the employee completed their key job performance requires to an agreed level of quality?
2. Has the employee completed their job tasks overall in sufficient quantity?
3. Has the employee completed their tasks without the need to ask colleagues how to do the tasks - do they have the knowledge?
4. Is the employee a self starter or does the supervisor need to get them started on their tasks?
5. Is the employee reliable?
6. Is the employee adaptable?

Every employee needs a goal. Without a goal people have no direction. The goal may be to improve a skill to attend some training to get a better outcome or simply to turn up on time.

Every employee who wants a career or who is capable of having a career needs a development plan. Not every employee needs a development plan. A development plan should seek to build skills and knowledge and influence behaviour by presenting the employee with challenging experiences and training to develop weaknesses in their competence. The competences targeted should be related to future job aspirations.

At the end of each appraisals the supervisor and the employee should agree, based on a combination of their job description, their personal goal, their development plan and the department's goals, a maximum of five key job requirements for the next review period.

Call us on +61 3 98138198 or email us to arrange a discussion about how a good performance appraisal system can improve employee retention, guest satisfaction scores and reduce recruitment costs.