The Portman Hotel Case Solution

THE PORTMAN HOTEL COMPANY CASE

Section 1: Statement of the problem facing the manager

The major problem faced by the vice president and managing director , Patrick Mene was to bail out the company from current state of employee dissatisfaction through strategic human resource management to provide best customer service and increase the profits for the company .

Analyzing the situation using SWOT and PESTC analysis, we arrive at certain factors that could explain the current situation in the company.

SWOT:

Strengths:

* Key business strategy of providing the unparalleled personal service to each guest.

* Each of the employees was considered as an asset and elaborate employee rights were listed in contracts with them.

* The philosophy of the hotel emphasized on high quality but cost effective service.

* Hotel recruited very selectively and demanded long term commitment from the employees.

* Recruitment was done on certain life themes like assertiveness, positivity, responsibility, pride and gestalt.

* Concept of “no rules” for the guests.

* Except for the 9 engineers, none of the rest of the employees had joined any of the union.

Weakness:

* The very philosophy of the hotel to cut down on the middle management and put more employees at the guest front proved to be flawed as there was acute paucity of proper supervision for the lower level employees.

* Due to random allocation of the employees at various jobs led to utter chaos while dealing with the hotel guests.

* A very broad nature of the job increased the responsibilities of the associates.

* The attrition rate among the PVs was very high.

* The actual tips received by the PVs were dismally low compared to the expected weekly amount.

* There was lack of coordination and trust among various groups of employees and their interpersonal relations were strained.

* Low occupancy of rooms created problems for a stable service team.

Opportunities...