HRMG 4203 Week 7 Cause Elimination Memo Example

Memorandum

To: Denise Hollis, Executive Housekeeper, Commerce Street Hotel

From: HR Analyst

Date: October 5, 2026

Re: Which explanation for weekend room attendant departures survives

The Standard

Kepner and Tregoe (1965) recommend describing a problem by what it is and what it could be but is not, along four dimensions, and then asking which candidate cause accounts for the difference. Table 1 applies their dimensions to departures at the Commerce Street Hotel, the invented property whose room attendant losses this analysis has followed.

Table 1

Is and Is Not: Room Attendant Departures

Composite case; figures from the case exhibits.

Outside Pay Fails at Where

The first candidate is that attendants are leaving for better pay elsewhere. Both teams earn the same $17.25 hourly wage, so outside offers should pull equally on weekday and weekend new hires. They cannot account for the distinction in the "where" row: a weekend-only difference. Outside offers may still be raising turnover everywhere at a lower level, and the weekday team's modest rise, from 3 departures to 7, is consistent with that. But they do not explain the problem as defined.

The Supervisor Fails at When

The second candidate is the weekend supervisor promoted on May 6. Departures on the weekend team rose from April. A cause cannot follow its effect, so the promotion cannot account for the distinction in the "when" row. Her practices could have made matters worse after May, and nothing here clears her of that. But the rise was already under way when she started.

Late Checkouts Account for Every Line

The third candidate is paid late checkout, launched on March 1, against a room quota that stayed at 15 per shift. It accounts for each distinction. What: it squeezes the cleaning window, which is room attendants' work and not supervisors' or laundry's. Where: late checkouts average 64 rooms on weekend days and 12 on weekdays. When: it began in March, a month before departures rose. Extent: new attendants, slowest at the job and, according to the front-desk lead, often on the convention floors where late checkouts concentrate, would feel the squeeze first, and newcomers have the fewest ties holding them to a job (Mitchell et al., 2001). No distinction is left unexplained.

What Could Still Overturn It

This conclusion stands only against the rivals considered. A second weekend change in March that the case never mentions, such as a new laundry schedule or a change in how convention blocks are assigned, could account for the same pattern. Two pieces of data would test the conclusion directly: floor assignments by tenure, to confirm new hires clean the heaviest late-checkout floors, and weekly departures set against weekly late-checkout counts. Both could be pulled from existing hotel systems. Platt (1964) argued that a surviving hypothesis earns confidence only by passing tests that could have sunk it, and these two are the tests to run next.

What I Am Asking

Please authorize a pull of floor assignments and weekly late-checkout counts for April to September, so that the leading explanation can be tested before any response is chosen. I will report the result within two weeks. Until then, I recommend holding off on any change to pay or to the weekend supervisor's role, since neither explanation survived the test and acting on one now would spend money and goodwill on a cause the evidence does not support.

References

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

Mitchell, T. R., Holtom, B. C., Lee, T. W., Sablynski, C. J., & Erez, M. (2001). Why people stay: Using job embeddedness to predict voluntary turnover. Academy of Management Journal, 44(6), 1102-1121. https://doi.org/10.5465/3069391

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