HRMG 4203 Week 11 Final Case Report Example

Why New Weekend Room Attendants Keep Leaving the Commerce Street Hotel: A Case Report From Facts to Recommendation, With the Tests That Could Prove It Wrong

Student Name

Walden University

HRMG 4203: Human Resource Management: Analysis and Problems

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Why New Weekend Room Attendants Keep Leaving the Commerce Street Hotel: A Case Report From Facts to Recommendation, With the Tests That Could Prove It Wrong

Executive Summary

Problem. Since April, the weekend team's newest attendants, those under six months, have been quitting at about four times the weekday pace, even after heavier weekend hiring is counted. Nineteen weekend attendants left between April and September, against three in the first quarter.

Explanation. Paid late checkout, launched on March 1, shortens the weekend cleaning window while the room quota stays at 15 per shift. It is the only explanation, of three tested, consistent with both which team is losing people and when the losses began.

Recommendation. Adopt a sliding quota: on weekend days with more than 40 late checkouts, attendants clean 13 rooms instead of 15. Owner: the executive housekeeper. Start: November 6.

Review. January 15. Should departures among new weekend attendants stay flat, reopen the problem definition and test the weekend supervisor's practices next.

Facts

The Commerce Street Hotel, the case's 620-room convention property in Indianapolis, employs 74 room attendants, 44 on a weekday team and 30 on a weekend team that works Friday through Monday. New hires start on the weekend team. Pay is $17.25 an hour and the quota 15 rooms a shift on both teams. Late checkout until 2 p.m. went on sale in March; a new weekend supervisor was promoted in May; new room-assignment software reached every shift in June. Weekend overtime rose from 38 to 96 hours a weekend between the first and third quarters, and Sunday complaints about unready rooms grew from a handful each month to 21. Saturday and Sunday late checkouts ran near 64 rooms a day, against a dozen midweek, concentrated on floors 14 through 22, where convention groups stay. The full fact sheet, with each fact's source and limits, is in Appendix A.

The Problem, Defined and Defended

The definition used throughout is one sentence with four parts, who, measured how, against whom and since when: since April, weekend attendants under six months' tenure have quit faster, measured per attendant on the payroll, than any other group, by more than hiring growth explains. A rate rather than a count matters, because new hires leave at higher rates almost everywhere and the weekend team takes all of them (Griffeth et al., 2000). On the case's figures the weekend rate is near 127 percent a year and the weekday rate near 32 percent. Broader framings, such as "high turnover" or "the weekend team is understaffed," were rejected because they could not be tested or assumed a cause.

Three Explanations and How Two Fell

Three candidates were each given their best case before any was judged, following the advice of Platt (1964) to hold rival hypotheses that predict different things. Outside job offers, suggested by exit forms ticking "better opportunity," predicted rising departures on both teams, since pay is identical; the rise is concentrated on one. The weekend supervisor promoted on May 6 predicted a rise starting after May; the rise began in April. Late checkouts against a fixed quota predicted a rise starting after March, concentrated on weekends and heaviest where late checkouts cluster, and fit every line of an is/is-not analysis in the manner of Kepner and Tregoe (1965). Five other details, including short tenure, overtime and Sunday complaints, fit all three candidates and so decided nothing. The detail-by-candidate matrix is in Appendix B.

Table 1

How Each Candidate Fared on the Two Deciding Details

Composite case. Full matrix in Appendix B.

Effects on the People Involved

Three responses were read for their effects on seven groups. Spreading new hires across both teams helped weekend new hires but shifted training onto weekday attendants without changing the squeeze. A per-floor cap on weekend late checkouts would help attendants but cut a revenue line the front-office manager controls, and she has the power to block it. The sliding quota costs labor hours, which the general manager will watch, but some of those hours are already paid as weekend overtime and the quota also reduces Sunday complaints he answers for. Weekend new hires, the group most affected, have almost no power in the decision, which is why the executive housekeeper, who holds power, legitimacy and urgency in the sense of Mitchell et al. (1997), is named as owner.

Recommendation and Fallback

The executive housekeeper should adopt the sliding quota from November 6: on weekend days with more than 40 late checkouts, 13 rooms per attendant instead of 15, with two or three on-call shifts scheduled for trigger days. The front office should share late-checkout bookings by each Thursday so the trigger can be set in advance. Should the quota fail in January, a per-floor cap on floors 14 to 22 comes next, for one quarter. The cap is the fallback rather than the first choice because it acts on only one side of the mismatch and meets stronger resistance.

What Would Prove This Wrong

Four findings would overturn the analysis. First, if weekend new-hire departure rates fall no further after two months of the quota than they would have anyway, the late-checkout explanation weakens. Second, if floor assignments show that new hires rarely clean floors 14 to 22, the mechanism linking late checkouts to new-hire departures loses its main support. Third, if weekly departures do not track weekly late-checkout counts, the explanation is in doubt. Fourth, if a second weekend change in March surfaces that the case never mentioned, the elimination would need to be rerun with it included. Each test uses data the hotel already holds.

What the Case Never Said

The case gives no local wage data, so the pull of outside employers cannot be measured. It contains no interviews with leavers, so their reasons are known only through a box on an exit form. It never explains why new hires start on the weekend team, so that rule cannot yet be judged. These gaps are named as limits rather than filled with assumptions (Hom et al., 2017).

Appendices

Appendix A, the fact sheet, lists twenty-two facts with their locations and limits. Appendix B, the evidence matrix, sets seven details against three candidates with a weight for each.

References

Griffeth, R. W., Hom, P. W., & Gaertner, S. (2000). A meta-analysis of antecedents and correlates of employee turnover: Update, moderator tests, and research implications for the next millennium. Journal of Management, 26(3), 463-488. https://doi.org/10.1177/014920630002600305

Hom, P. W., Lee, T. W., Shaw, J. D., & Hausknecht, J. P. (2017). One hundred years of employee turnover theory and research. Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(3), 530-545. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000103

Kepner, C. H., & Tregoe, B. B. (1965). The rational manager: A systematic approach to problem solving and decision making. McGraw-Hill.

Mitchell, R. K., Agle, B. R., & Wood, D. J. (1997). Toward a theory of stakeholder identification and salience: Defining the principle of who and what really counts. Academy of Management Review, 22(4), 853-886. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.1997.9711022105

Platt, J. R. (1964). Strong inference. Science, 146(3642), 347-353. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.146.3642.347