Keeping Hotel Workers: It Takes More Than Money to Retain Lower-Paid Employees. (Employment & Staffing Agenda)

Poe, Andrea C., HRMagazine

Charles Hegeman needed a short-term job in Washington, D.C., so he could get some cash for a move to California. A friend told him about her employer, the Hotel Lombardy, part of the Classic Hospitality consortium of five boutique hotels in the city. He took what he thought would be a brief gig at the front desk. That was over five years ago, and he's still on Classic Hospitality's payroll.

"I found I had a knack for making people happy," Hegeman says, and that opened doors to new responsibilities for him. Within a year, the hotel had promoted him to assistant front office manager. "I liked the hotel business so much that I decided to stay," he says.

When Hegeman felt ready to move up to a new challenge, he told the consortium's human resources director. The company worked with him to find a position within the organization that matched his interests. Now Hegeman is a sales manager for another of the company's properties, the State Plaza Hotel. "Charles is exactly who we want to have at our hotels," says Karen Welzel, corporate HR director for Classic Hospitality. "We worked with him to keep him with us."

It wasn't luck that kept Hegeman on a career path at Classic Hospitality, it was corporate planning. The HR department established programs designed to bolster the quality of new recruits and encourage the best employees to stay. "There are so many hotels in this city and [there is] so much competition for workers that we know we have to do all we can to keep really good people with us or else they can--and will--go elsewhere," Welzel explains.

The lodging industry, routinely …

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Publication information: Article title: Keeping Hotel Workers: It Takes More Than Money to Retain Lower-Paid Employees. (Employment & Staffing Agenda). Contributors: Poe, Andrea C. - Author. Magazine title: HRMagazine. Volume: 48. Issue: 2 Publication date: February 2003. Page number: 91+. © 1999 Society for Human Resource Management. COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group.

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