Effect Of Motivational Incentives On Staff Turnover In Hotel Industry In Gombe State

Central Theme of Journal

The paper intends to review a journal written on employee motivation within hotel and hospitality industry focusing on hotels situated in Gombe State of south eastern Nigeria. The objective is to highlight to find out the role of motivational incentives like additional monetary and leave benefits in employee turnover across hotel industry of Gombre state. In order to conduct the study, three hotels have been considered as respondents and finding suggests a positive impact can be seen over employee turnover if workforce is provided with such benefits. This paper will highlight the supporting information and facts following with the central theme. Specialized terms, which have been used here, will be elaborated in order to deliver deeper knowledge of the journal. Finally, towards the end of the review a personal experience will be attached regarding employee motivation and organizational performance.

Musa, B. M., Ahmed, I., & Bala, A. (2014). Effect of Motivational Incentives on Staff Turnover in Hotel Industry in Gombe State. Journal of Business and Management, 16(3), 36-42.

As described in the introduction this journal tries to find out the influence of motivational incentives and benefits over employee satisfaction, turnover and organizational development. Like every business organisation, hotel industry is likely to retain and works on increasing employees’ effectiveness following various methods too. Every industry runs on certain objectives, which must be well communicated among the workforce to drive them towards achieving them. Organisations try to make the communication process inspirational for the employees regarding accomplishment of organizational objectives. However, the entire process confronts with disturbance if workers’ physiological and psychological needs are ignored by the organisation or industry. Focusing on this ongoing issue of the hotel industry as well as concerning employee turnover and their effectiveness, the theme of this journal revolves around highlighting the situation of Nigerian hotel industry and positive impact of several motivational benefits to improve the situation. However, there were no proven method to increase their effectiveness and control voluntary turnover. Therefore, this journal has focused on researching the reason by evaluating various application of motivational factors to increase productivity, efficiency and control employee turnover.

Supporting facts are collected from various literature that employees, generally, leave a job for a better opportunity, better salary and benefits. Besides, a deteriorated work culture and environment, dissatisfaction towards management and better career prospects lead an employee to leave his/her previous workplace. Therefore, it has been understood that behind successful organizational objectives, there are certain aspects regarding employee satisfaction, which help entrepreneurs to accomplish goals and organizational development. Not only offered benefits and salary structure, but also the work environment must be suitable to every individual. There are some necessary aspects, which makes a workplace ideal. Managerial designation holders must remember the fact that employees are the human capital they are investing into for achieving better future for organisation. Therefore, positive results will occur only when their productivity and efficiency can be influenced. In case, an employee faces misbehaviour from any colleague or harassment from managers, employees tend to feel reluctant working under a situation like this.

Supporting Information and Facts

The next supporting idea that has been generated from various literatures on the relationship of employee behaviour and role of workplace motivation is motivating employees increases their performance. Pay scale, penalisation or appreciation are part of any prestigious job, which leads to employee satisfaction and accomplishments of targets related to various job roles. Monetary Incentive related targets are likely to explore employees’ potential accelerates their performance and boost company revenue accordingly. However, in Nigerian Hotel industry, as per the collected data from three hotels across Gombe state, shift timings are tiring and additionally, work environment and working hours are not flexible enough, which is affecting both their physical and mental health. Therefore, managers must understand offending efficient employees will lead to disappointment in terms of organizational development. Employee retention issue can be highly risky for production and reputation as well. Every employee possesses different perspective about workplace environment; it can be enjoyable for some and at the same time can be stressful for others. However, there are various factors, which work equally in terms of employee behaviour towards organisation. As instance, monetary benefits, flexible working shifts, occasional communication sessions to collect their feedback and proving a healthy work atmosphere generally help to increase employee performance as well as restrict voluntary turnover.

The journal presents various literary evidence that motivation is a psychological influence. It can be monetary incentives or mutual collaboration. Hotel industry is highly professional and requires employees’ utmost dedication and time. However, no employee can compromise his or her minimum personal space and work for longer working hours (more than 10 hours) just for more money for a long time. It is true it can motivate fewer employees yet it is not applicable if long-term results are needed. At a certain point, employees will realise mental peace is important. In the addition, acknowledgment, appreciation and collaborative working environment are highly motivating than monetary incentives. Yet the fact cannot be denied that people do work for money. Although, the central driving factor is money only, as far as hotel industry is concerned workers are more stressed working in longer hours of a single shift and survive.

On the other hand, there are employees who think that they are underpaid as compared to their workload and leave an organisation for better pay scale even if the workload is same or higher in new company. Motivation is entirely psychological and managers need to apply strategies after understanding the mass requirement while structuring the regulations for employees. Organizational management must keep the certain areas of employee satisfaction consistently under supervision because with high employee satisfaction comes customer satisfaction accordingly. In case, the planning and new strategies are successful retaining the employees, an accelerated productivity can be achieved as well with the newly developed and improved relationship between the management and the workforce. In case the company is on the verge of organizational change or going through a transformation along with distributing the new responsibilities managers must supervise and give attention to employees’ interest and to those aspects, which are responsible for influencing employee behaviour and merge them with the organizational objectives.

Along with sharing responsibilities of decision-making, monetary incentives and benefit plans managers apply several motivational theories to influence the workforce towards betterment. Company can provide association in career development by providing various training and development programme according to their job profile and interest. The expectation behind helping the employees to achieve their aspirations is they will support the organization to combat future challenges and requirements. This will help to retain employees as eventually they realise holding a designation for too long is against future growth and try to cooperate with the company in search for development opportunity. Company also get benefits from their newly acquired skills and knowledge. A mutual relationship of trust and dependency works as motivational incentive without involving any monetary gain.

Incentives are important to improve staff effectiveness as well. This journal has explored several related literature as well as evaluated supporting data collected from the respondents and has come into a solution that incentives has multipurpose use within an organisational setting. It is important to increase employee productivity, enhance the quality of work atmosphere and employee commitment. Besides, induces job satisfaction and provide career development programmes as incentives in order to explore their capabilities to fulfil organisation’s interest.

Managers consistently seek for new motivational strategies and theories. Theories have addressed two different needs of employees while working for an organisation. It needs several hygiene factors as a well-supervised workforce in a friendly work environment, with whom managers share a trustworthy relationship and zero salary issues make a workplace better and make the employees stay. Besides, there are basic human needs, which can be divided into categories like psychological, safety, social as well as need of recognition and satisfaction. The role of the managers and motivators is to keep these aspects in mind while setting motivational strategies.

As per the responses collected from three hotels across Gombe state of Nigeria, it has been noticed that 60% of the respondents strongly agree with the fact that they feel low pay scale and minimum benefits are one of the central reasons behind employee turnover in hotel industry of the state. Around 67% of the employees agree with the fact that poor relationship with the management and co-workers and 56% of them admit motivation works to overcome such difficulties and enhance employee performance.

The finding suggests a strong relationship between the factors like salary, benefits, development and training programme, working hours and the employee turnover. In future if these areas are not addressed and treated properly, hotel industry will continue to suffer with voluntary turnover of employees and failed organizational goals. Therefore, the recommendation made by this journal is appropriate enough as they suggest including both the monetary and non-monetary incentives as motivational factors to enhance both the employee and organizational performance.

Terms	Descriptions
Motivational incentives	§ Incentives are provided for enhanced performance and stimulates productivity. No organisation promises to give incentives with a purpose behind. There are various reasons why companies opt for giving incentives to motivate employees for performing better and continue to support business operations. § Reasons behind promising incentives are: i) monetary incentives are important in terms of fulfilling psychological, social and security requirements. ii) Non-monetary incentives are varied and plays major role in terms of employee satisfaction and enhancing their performance. Among them, a secure status of a job, recognition of good work, career development and promotional opportunities are important in terms of employee satisfaction.
Staff turnover	§ In terms of human resource, employee turnover is the measurement of timeline, such as for how long a company is able to retain an employee and the necessity of replacing an employee with someone more efficient. Turnover is of two types voluntary and involuntary. Voluntary turnover occurs when employee are not satisfied with the provided benefits and environment. Impact of high turnover is immense as far as organizational goals and productivity is concerned.
Retention	§ Employee retention is the procedure of withholding an employee for organisational benefit by providing necessary incentives and satisfactory work atmosphere.

I believe; motivation has a crucial position in a business organisation as far as employee retention is concerned. Efficient employees are human capital of organisation. Now a day, it has become more important to invest on developing human resource than to invest money into some other aspects. In order to do that manages must understand the individual demand of employees and how they can be motivated towards the shared goals. Managers generally seek for some common factors, which can work for wide range of the workforce. Providing them with psychological support, security and social supports through non-monetary mode of incentives. The journal has focused on monetary motivational incentives yet while researching, the role of non-monetary incentives have been highlighted as well according to responses gathered from the respondents. In my opinion, apart from monetary incentives organizations are capable of enhancing workers performance and motivate them towards shared goals.

Supervisors are well aware of the power of human resource and consistently try to explore the potential of employees. Other than managers, a good social life boosts the performance and enhance productivity as well. Maintenance of good relationship with the co-workers create a wish to come over to workplace every day and makes an employee updated about the necessary information. Every individual has some unique quality. Communicating and sharing knowledge with them will not only increase perception yet initiates a healthy workplace competition. Therefore, absence of these factors in an organisation leads to mass voluntary turnover that is a negative sign for the organisational productivity and targeted goals. Apart from that, employee he or she is responsible partly for low productivity or bad performance as a result of weak self-analysis.  

In my workplace, hotel of a Gombe state in Nigeria, employees used to be happy until managers stated to look over the issues with the overtime and working hours starts behaving in an inhumane way. Tiring long shifts, workload and lack of non-monetary incentives lead towards employee turnover in this region of Nigerian hotel industry mostly as compared to involuntary turnover. As a result, hotel industry is suffering with lack of adequate staffs and even efficient too. I feel an ideal workplace must have an ideal atmosphere first where an employee can freely collaborate and communicate with his or her managers and colleagues. Benefits and salary is justified according to the job role and work pressure. Employees feel motivated through career development plan provided by the company and willingly considers organizational goals as a step ahead towards self-development as well.

Therefore, it can be concluded stating that human resource department has a huge responsibility in motivating employees towards organisational goals or to retain them. Retaining efficient employees is important for challenges and requirement of the organisation. In case, there is lack of understanding about employee demand and their expectation the origination may lose human capital, which is one of the strongest backbone of business operation. Hence, I believe; as per the knowledge that I have gained from various literature on this matter and personal experience, motivation is essential in terms of retaining employees for betterment of the business.

References

Musa, B. M., Ahmed, I., & Bala, A. (2014). Effect of Motivational Incentives on Staff Turnover in Hotel Industry in Gombe State. Journal of Business and Management, 16(3), 36-42.