Relevant issues and challenges at Junction Hotel

Junction Hotel is one of the more popular destinations for both the young as well as the mature consumers. It carries tradition and history, but has managed to combine them with modernity and style in a manner which attracts consumers of all ages and socio-cultural backgrounds. The product and service selection at the Junction Hotel is increased, to as such ensure high levels of satisfaction for the various clients.

The Junction Hotel -- despite its success -- also faced a series of issues. These are complex and pegged to numerous organisational features. Among these features three have been selected as more important to be addressed: efficiency, employee management and international expansion.

Efficiency drive

Junction Hotel, similar to any other economic agent functioning within the modern day society, is faced with mounting threats and challenges. They -- the economic agents -- must for instance face incremental competition at both national as well as international levels. Then, they have to ensure customer satisfaction and the ability to continually adapt to the newer and emergent demands of the customers. Also they have to motivate the staffs to increase their performances and they have to operate in a means in which they support environmental stability. And through all these, they have to attain their financial objectives. In other words, the managerial team at the Junction Hotel has to attain the traditional objective of profit registration, but it must do so through the satisfaction of the needs and wants of as many stakeholder categories as possible.

In an effort to respond to all these challenges and still attain the profitability goals, the managerial team at the Junction Hotel focuses on generating operational efficiency. The concept of operational efficiency is generically understood as the ability to maximize the outcomes within the imposed restriction of the inputs. Specifically, the processes of operational efficiency strive to maximize gains while minimizing costs (Cullinane, 2008).

The promoter of organisational efficiency is generically accepted as Henry Ford, the visionary who made the automobile accessible to the wider population and forever changed the face of humanity. This outcome was however possible not due to a vision, but more so due to a practical decision -- the creation of the Ford automobile on the production line. This specifically meant that the assembly line was formed in the materialization of a conveyor belt which transported all components to the employees. Efficiency was created as the employees were no longer forced to themselves get the pieces they needed, and they no longer wasted valuable time completing transitory operations.

Aside from reducing the need for transitory operations, the assembly line was also efficient as it ensured that each staff member working on the assembly line was only completing the tasks assigned to them. In other words, while redundant, all employees were specialized on a specific task and came to the ability to complete that task within restricted time frames and with high levels of efficiency.

Henry Ford as such created the practical context in which organisational efficiency was born, but he also created the circumstances and the environment in which efficiency was supported within the long-term. As the specialized literature of today tells us, whenever change is implemented within the organisational context, employees tend to reveal reticence and not embrace the change process. This result could be the reaction of numerous features, such as fear of the unknown, lack of desire to learn new things as the current position is comfortable or other reasons. But like a visionary, Henry Ford did not allow the staff members to be reticent to the assembly line, but increased their wages to stimulate them. Practically, in a context in which the weekly salary was of $11, Ford raised it to $5 per day, to a more than double weekly total of $25 (The Lincoln Library of Shapers of Society).

The decision made by Ford could be debated today through the lenses of the numerous approaches to the motivational theory. What Ford virtually did was to stimulate change implementation by financially rewarding the employees. He as such used money to motivate the employees and it would appear that the strategy paid off. Nevertheless, when assessing Ford's decision through the lenses of Herzberg's motivational theory, it is revealed that Ford did not generate employee satisfaction. To better explain, Herberg argues that the employees' satisfaction on the job -- and ergo their motivation, commitment and performance levels -- is pegged to two distinct sets of motivators: true motivators and hygiene factors.

The hygiene factors include the salary, the working conditions, the working policies and other such features. Herzberg argued that these hygiene factors created a safe working environment in which the employees were not dissatisfied, but in which they were neither motivated. He in fact believed that true motivation came from the true motivators, which include the sense of achievement, recognition, responsibility, personal development and advancement (Chapman, 2010). Henry Ford's financial incentives to the employees are integrated within the category of hygiene factors, which create mere content. It would as such be visible how the implementation of financial incentives to create efficiency and employee satisfaction at the Junction Hotel would be necessary, but insufficient to also create motivation and commitment.

Today, efficiency is created no longer through the assembly lines alone. The standardization of production remains a focal point of efficiency, but it is no longer sufficient. A relevant example of modern day efficiency creation is represented by the McDonald's Corporation. Blamed for its promotion of an unhealthy nutrition throughout the world, McDonald's in the epitome of business success and its triumphs are so great that they embody the entire process of globalization under the syntax of McDonaldisation -- the term is in fact a particularization of the wider concepts of Westernisation and Americanisation, which imply that the phenomenon of globalization is in fact unilateral, with the predominant influences and benefits being registered on the part of the Western Hemisphere, particularly the United States, and with the influence of McDonald's being tremendous on the populations outside the U.S.

At a more specific level, the term of McDonalisation was coined by George Ritzer, who defines it as:

"The process by which the principles of the fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as well as of the rest of the world" (Outside In, 2011).

According to Ritzer, and based on Max Weber theories, there are four particular principles sitting at the basis of McDonaldisation, as follows: efficiency, predictability, calculability and control. All of these are necessary to attain the level of corporate success which has been attained by McDonald's. In other words, in order for the Junction Hotel to attain the high levels of success it strives for, it is not sufficient for it to only seek efficiency, but it must also possess predictability, control and calculability.

3. Internal issues

At the level of the internal issues at the Junction Hotel, emphasis is placed on two distinctive concerns: the management of the staff members and the international expansion of the hotel. Each of these two issues is more than complex and further divides into a myriad of other concerns. In terms of the management of the employees for instance, some of the more common issues would include the compensation packages, the training of the employees, the compliance with the employment legislations, the creation of positions and job designs and so on. Then, at the level of the international expansion, some of the more important issues could refer to the legal, political or economic barriers in expansion, the business model used in expansion (for example sole proprietorship vs. franchise) or the resource necessities and restrictions pegged to the expansion process.

Still, in spite of the complexity and large number of issues, it is important to only select two of the most relevant ones. In this order of ideas, at the level of the employee management, emphasis is placed on the efforts to be made to increase efficiency. In terms of the international expansion, emphasis is placed on the cultural dimension of the expansion process. Specifically, it is wondered how standardized international expansion would be impacted by the need to work with individuals of different cultural backgrounds.

The employees at the Junction Hotel generally perform standardized tasks, which require low levels of performance and quality of work. The result is that of low levels of wages and the subsequent low levels of employee performance and satisfaction. This in turn negatively impacts organsational efficiency. The lines below reveal some recommendations as to how efficiency could be increased at the Junction Hotel, especially in the context of the highly standardised operations:

Reducing the number of breaks to one, two most, during the eight hours of work (United States Air Force, 2008). This refers specifically to the number of breaks, not the overall duration of the total break. If for instance one Junction Hotel would offer its employees 8 breaks, of 8 minutes each break, it would mean that the employees can interrupt work during each hour. They think about the break, they go on the break and the come back thinking about the passed break and waiting to the future one. By the time they focus on the actual task, the next break is up. But if they get two breaks, of 30 minutes each, then they will not constantly interrupt their work and the efficiency would increase.

Setting stricter deadlines, but -- as a manager -- being prepared for them to be delayed. This strategy is useful as the stress of an upcoming deadline will often press the employees to be more active and efficient (Schilling, 2007). This does not mean that the employees would be exploited, only that the time allocated to procrastination is decreased.

Developing and implementing a reward system, based on performances. In other words, it would be necessary for the managers at the Junction Hotel to evaluate the efficiency of each individual employee and reward them based on their performance levels. Such an effort would materialize in motivation to increase efficiency, as well as the sense of worth and constructive competition between the staff members (Griffin and Moorhead, 2009).

In terms of the international expansion, it is noted that the Junction Hotel is becoming more and more of a global presence, especially as it is now an integrant part of the Hilvomada chain. It as such comes to operate across several countries and it implements the same standardized model in doing so. But despite the fact that international expansion presents the company with the benefits of wider customer bases and as such larger revenues, it also reveals the challenge of additional barriers to cross. One of the more relevant of these challenges is represented by the cultural differences.

Cultural differences play an essential part in the successful international expansion of an organization, in the meaning that unless the cultural differences are adequately understood, the organisational process would suffer. Furthermore, the cultural differences must not only be understood, but they must also be responded. Otherwise put, it is necessary for the Junction Hotel to understand and adapt its model to the specifics of the cultural background in a new region in which it operates, otherwise it risks failing at its effort of international expansion. Probably the most eloquent example in this sense is represented by the case of Wal-Mart in Germany. Wal-Mart is the undisputable leader of the retail industry in the United States, but its expansion in Germany has been a complete fiasco. The company strived to implement the model exactly as it was in the U.S. And did not understand and respect the privacy of the German population, their labor laws and the characteristics of the population (Knorr and Arndt, 2003). After a decade of struggle, it was forced to eventually exit the market and count its million dollar losses.