Staff Turnover Problem

The Star Plaza, a California-based 5star hotel, has enjoyed a smooth growth curve over the past five years, primarily because of favourable customer response during the Industrial Developmental phase. The Star Plaza has had numerous Banqueting functions Indoor and Out door as well. Although the business is not declining but company is finding it increasingly difficult to keep its really good employees with them. Based on extensive turnover analysis conducted by Ned Jackson, the human resources planning manager. The Star Plaza's problem seems to be its inability to keep staff beyond the "critical" five year point. Apparently, the probability of turnover drops dramatically after five years of service. Ned's conclusion is that Star Plaza has been essentially serving as an industry college. Their staffing strategy has always been to hire the best and brightest hospitality graduates from the best hospitality schools in the United States. Ned believes that these graduates often get lost in the shuffle at the time they join the firm. For example, most (if not all) of the new hires must work on non-classified projects until cleared by Management to join a designated major project. This training period is somewhat 6 to 12 months In the meantime the major project has started, and these young graduates frequently miss out on its design phase, considered the most creative and challenging segment of the program. Because of the nature of operational work, new graduates often have difficulty learning the organizational culture - such as who to ask when you have a problem, what the general dos and don'ts are, and why the organization does things in a certain way.

After heading a task force of human resource professionals within Star Plaza, Ned has been designated to present to top management a proposal designed to reduce turnover among young Graduate recruits. The essence of his plan is to create a mentor program, except that in this plan the mentors will not be the seasoned graybeards of Star Plaza, but rather those graduates in the critical three-to-five year service window, the period of highest turnover. These graduates will be paired with new hospitality recruits before the recruits actually report to Star Plaza for work.

According to the task force, the programme is two fold :
(1) it benefits the newcomer by easing the transition into the company, and
(2) it helps the three-to-five-year service staff by enabling them to serve an important role for the company.

By performing the mentor role, these engineers will become more committed and hence less likely to leave. As Ned prepared his fifteen-minute presentation for top management, he wondered if he had adequately anticipated the possible objections to the program in order to make an intelligent HR system of it. Only time would tell.

Questions :
1. Identify the salient issues from HR point of view for this case.

2. If you were to study this turnover problem, how would you conduct a needs analysis or evolve a counseling programme ?

3. What are the causes of dissatisfaction and turnover in Star Plaza ?

4. Do you find the mentoring program suitable to reduce turnover? Justify your answer.