1. Based on the hotel’s stated strategy, list at least four or more important employee behaviors important for Hotel Paris’s staff to exhibit.

2. If time permits, spend some time prior to class observing the front desk clerk at a local hotel. In any case, create a job description for a Hotel Paris front desk clerk.

The New Job Descriptions

The Hotel Paris’s competitive strategy is “To use superior guest service to differentiate the Hotel Paris properties, and to thereby increase the length of stay and return rate of guests, and thus boost revenues and profitability.” HR manager Lisa Cruz must now formulate functional policies and activities that support this competitive strategy and boost performance by eliciting the required employee behaviors and competencies.

As an experienced human resource director, the Hotel Paris’s Lisa Cruz knew that recruitment and selection processes invariably influenced employee competencies and behavior and, through them, the company’s bottom line. Everything about the workforce—its collective skills, morale, experience, and motivation—depended on attracting and then selecting the right employees.

In reviewing the Hotel Paris’s employment systems, she was therefore concerned that virtually all the company’s job descriptions were out of date, and that many jobs had no descriptions at all. She knew that without accurate job descriptions, all her improvement efforts would be in vain. After all, if you don’t know a job’s duties, responsibilities, and human requirements, how can you decide whom to hire or how to train them? To create human resource policies and practices that would produce employee competencies and behaviors needed to achieve the hotel’s strategic aims, Lisa’s team first had to produce a set of usable job descriptions.

A brief analysis, conducted with her company’s CFO, reinforced that observation. They chose departments across the hotel chain that did and did not have updated job descriptions. While they understood that many other factors might be influencing the results, they believed that the statistical relationships they observed did suggest that having job descriptions had a positive influence on various employee behaviors and competencies. Perhaps having the descriptions facilitated the employee selection process, or perhaps the departments with the descriptions just had better managers. In any case, Lisa received the go-ahead to design new job descriptions for the chain.

While the resulting job descriptions included numerous traditional duties and responsibilities, most also included several competencies unique to each job. For example, job descriptions for the front-desk clerks included competencies such as “able to check a guest in or out in five minutes or less.” Most service employees’ descriptions included the competency, “able to exhibit patience and guest supportiveness even when busy with other activities.” Lisa knew that including these competencies would make it easier for her team to devise useful employee selection, training, and evaluation processes.