This report evaluates how Human Resource Management can support the business’s changes and how external factors impact the business. 2020 was a challenging year for the hotel and tourism industry. Accor Hotel Group, the ibis and Sofitel chain owner, swing to a $335 million loss in 2020. Accor is reducing schedules by 75% of its global head office teams for the 2nd Quarter of 2020 (Accor, 2021). The sector has been one of the hardest hit by the worldwide pandemic, with many hotels shut down or used as quarantine sites. At the height of the COVID 19 lockdowns, hotels were close to 10 percent occupancy. Therefore many just shut down. According to Deloitte Access Economics Tourism and Hotel Market outlook, these have been and remain testing and uncertain times for tourism and hotel operators who employ so many people and are crucial to those who rely on the tourism industry (The Sydney Morning Herald, 2021).
Furthermore, the Hospitality industry has to face stiff competition with luxury international hotels and mid-premium and economy players. Cost leadership can be used in these challenging times as it is highly effective in gaining market share and drawing customers’ attention (Sales Target, 2021). The company’s management team needs to constantly reduce the cost of one product and the entire range of products in its portfolio. To adopt this strategy, a company has to produce good quality goods to customers at a much lower and more competitive price than other companies producing the same product (Nisha, 2020). Although vaccines started to roll out across the world, the sector is still in one of the most challenging periods the industry has ever faced, and there is a long way to go until it is back to where it was before the pandemic.
Main Body of the Report
Drivers of Change
PESTLE analysis is the framework to monitor the macro-environmental factors that may dramatically affect an organization’s performance. This tool is handy when setting up a business or entering an international market. Environmental Factors have come to the topic only recently due to the increasing scarcity of raw materials, pollution targets, and government carbon footprints. These factors include environmental aspects such as weather and climate change, significantly affecting tourism, farming, and agriculture. It may lead to many companies getting more involved in practices such as corporate social responsibility. Accor Group has signed up to the Science Based Targets initiative to define a carbon trajectory compatible with the Paris Accord objective of limiting global warming to 1.5 Celsius to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. In January 2020, Accor announced its commitment to removing all single-use plastic items featuring its hotel’s customer experience by the end of 2022. Furthermore, eliminating all plastic straws and standard swabs already promised for the end of 2021, the new ACCOR Group commitment includes eliminating personal toiletries and cups made of plastic by 2020.
Legal factors include more special laws such as discrimination, employment, consumer protection, and health and safety laws. Firms need to know what is and are not legal to trade successfully and ethically. This becomes tricky if an organization trades globally since each country has its own rules and regulations. Accor Group estimates that full re-opening is still a distance away, and Australia and New Zealand is unlikely to open international borders until at least the start of 2022 as it seeks to contain the virus to relatively few cases, hospitality business has to become more adaptable to survive in the event of another global pandemic. Accor follows innkeeper laws, which ensure the welfare and safety of guests and their properties. In some locations, the innkeeper law must be posted inside the hotel’s door of every guest room.
In some cases, the innkeeper law will state how much compensation the innkeeper will pay guests if their property is stolen or damaged. It is widely used in collaboration with other business tools to understand a situation related to internal and external factors. Given the current situation, Accor is reducing schedules 75% of its global head office for the 2nd Quarter of 2020 to mitigate against the COVID 19 pandemic. The severity of the situation has forced the Accor group to take challenging but necessary protective measures such as temporary leave, freeze on their hires, and prune all non-essential costs. Culture generally becomes the focus of attention during periods of Organizational Change. Companies merge and their cultural clash, for example, when growth and other strategic Change indicate that the current culture becomes inappropriate and hinders rather than supports progress. Gerry Johnson developed the cultural web, and Kevan Scholes in 1992 provides one such approach for changing an organization’s culture. Using it, they can expose cultural assumptions and practices and align organizational elements with one another and with their strategy (Kramer, 2014). So for all elusiveness, corporate culture can significantly impact an organization’s work environment and output. The severity of the situation has forced the Accor group to take challenging but necessary protective measures such as temporary leave, freeze on their hires, and prune all non-essential costs. This strategy protects the employees who find themselves in a difficult situation due to the COVID 19 crisis. Corporate culture can significantly impact an organization’s work environment and output for all elusiveness. It is why much research has been done to pinpoint exactly what makes an influential corporate culture and how to differentiate a culture that isn’t working (Chon, 2012).
Change Management Requirement and processes within the organization.
For Lewin, human behavior’s stability was based on a quasi-stationary equilibrium of driving and restraining forces within a living space. Consequently, determining the person’s position within the living space is the first prerequisite for understanding behavior. These forces are usually challenging to change, as people find when they try to change their behavior. Thus, Lewin saw unfreezing as a challenging reeducation process, whereby, Benne notes, Men and women alter, replace, or transcend patterns of thinking and valuation (Weick, 1999). Unfreezing allows the fluidity necessary for Change. Lewin believed that the learning gained better equips people for future Change. For example, Accor group is preparing a potential post-pandemic tourism boom except for the just-announced travel bubble with New Zealand and communication in parts of Asia and Pacific down the track. A new approach to Human Resource Management, labeled sustainable Human Resource Management, has evolved. This approach explicitly recognizes the impact of people management policies on both human and financial outcomes has distilled the L&D experiences of top and rapidly improving companies on diversity to four key imperatives, creating the opportunity for CEOs to engage with their executive teams to set ambitious L&D aspirations for their organizations that are truly aligned with their business strategy. Delivering on these goals will require developing a solid understanding of the L&D baseline, creating a bespoke mix of priorities to maximize business impact, purposefully allocating the required time and resources, and maximizing ownership of the business unit, with active support from the talent management organization (Buchanan 2017).
HR strategy for change management- in the medium term
Human Resource Model is a term that stands for an organization’s strategic scheme designed to help administer and coordinate business functions regarding human capital. The 5p’s model is a form of strategic HRM developed by Randell Shuler, a praised scholar dedicated to global HRM and business strategy and human resource management interface. As the name suggests, the 5p’s model is based on purpose, principle, people, process, and performance. According to this framework, aligning and balancing these five principles leads to success. Improved productivity and reaching the set company goals remain the main focus of all HR endeavors. Although no model created today offers a perfect solution for all HR efforts, understanding HRM frameworks in diversity is crucial. Like a particular aspect, yet different from others, the HRM model developed so far gives HR teams and specialists an excellent foundation to design, adjust, improve, and new practices for the future (Zibarras, 2015). Every organization requires a specific approach to accomplish the ultimate goals of HRM:
They are recruiting the best employees.
They are providing quality and relevant staff training.
Monitoring performance in ways that generate reliable results.
- Designing and implementing employee welfare.
- Managing useful reports.
Sustainable HRM started to grow during the past decade, and it is an attempt to continue with the relationship between HRM practices and result beyond predominantly financial consequences. Sustainable HRM represents a new guide to managing people and offers an opportunity to improve management practice and extend the grounding that sustainability is an appropriate concept for HRM. We discovered that the business case for diversity is compelling and has global relevance through this assessment. We have highlighted the opportunity to promote diversity in senior decision-making roles, specifically in line roles on the executive team. Although the level of diverse representation in top teams is still precious globally, with progress being slow overall, there are practical lessons from successful companies that have done L&D work for them (Singh, 2018).
However, the COVID 19 pandemic has resulted in the loss of livelihood across the spectrum. The travel and tourism industry has been severely impacted due to travel bans and lockdown. Owing to the crisis, major hospitality brands worldwide are closing permanently. Some struggle, while others resort to cost-saving measures such as layoffs, employee furloughs, and pay cuts. However, certain hotels take various short- and long-term human resource measures to tide over the crisis (Rokou, 2020).
Resistance to Change and Managing change
Kotter and Schlesinger’s Managing resistance model provides a practical, tested way to believe in managing that Change. It should be considered that nothing is challenging to think about managing that Change. It must be regarded as nothing more to carry out, doubtful of success, or more challenging to handle than to initiate a new order of things. Subsequent events have confirmed the significance of this concern about organizational Change. Today, more managers must deal with new government regulations, products, growth, and competition to undertake organizational changes once a year and significant changes every four or five (Van de Vaan,1995).
People also combat against Change because they fear they will not develop new skills and behavior. All humans are limited in their ability to change that they will require. All human beings are hesitant to change, with some people being much more limited than others. Organizational Change can inadvertently need people to change too much, too quickly. Peter Drucker has argued that the major obstacle to corporate growth is managers’ incompetence to change their behavior as rapidly as their organizations require. Even when managers intellectually agree on the need for changes in how they operate, they sometimes are emotionally unable to transition.
Furthermore, to deal with resistance is to incentivize potential resisters. For example, management could offer a union a higher rate in return for a work rule change. It can increase an individual’s pension benefits in return for early retirement. Negotiation is generally appropriate when it is clear that someone will lose out due to a change and their power to protest is significant. Negotiated agreements can be a mainly easy way to avoid considerable resistance, though they may become expensive like some other resistance. Once a manager clarifies that he will negotiate to avoid significant resistance, he opens himself up to the possibility of blackmail.
Conclusion
A new approach to Human Resource Management was recently labeled sustainable Human Resource management. It started to recognize the impact people management policies have on human and financial outcomes. Sustainable HRM is about a new approach to managing people and offers an opportunity to improve management practice and extend the grounding that sustainability is an appropriate concept for HRM. However, COVID 19 crisis made it difficult for the Human Resource department to manage and keep their employees across many industries. The Accor group has launched a heartiest Fund, a $70 million COVID 19 particular purpose vehicle whose aim is to guide the group’s employees, support to pay medical fees for those who do not have social security or medical help, and on the case- to case, to furloughed employees suffering great financial distress (Scott, 2021).
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