Challenges and Opportunities in Healthcare Volunteer Management: Insights from Volunteer Administrators

Volunteer administrators from 105 hospitals in five states in the northeast and southern United States provided open-ended survey responses about what they perceived to be the most pressing challenges and opportunities facing healthcare volunteer management. Taken together, these 105 hospitals used a total of 39,008 volunteers and 5.3 million volunteer hours during a 12-month period between 2010 and 2011. A qualitative content analysis of administrator responses suggests that primary challenges include volunteer recruitment and retention, administrative issues, and operational difficulties brought about by the current economic crisis. Key opportunities include more explicitly linking the volunteer function to hospital outcomes and community impact, expanding volunteer recruitment pools and roles and jobs, and developing organizational support for volunteers and making the volunteer management function more efficient and effective.

The Business Case for (and Against) Restaurant Tipping

Recent interest in replacing tipping with service charges or higher service-inclusive menu pricing prompted this review of empirical evidence on the advantages and disadvantages to restaurants of these different compensation systems. The evidence indicates that these different pricing systems affect the attraction and retention of service workers, the satisfaction of customers with service, the actual and perceived costs of eating out, and the costs of hiring employees and doing business. However, the author comes away from the data believing that the biggest reason for restaurateurs to replace tipping is that the practice takes revenue away from them in the form of lower prices and gives it to servers in the form of excessively high tip income. The biggest reason for restaurateurs to keep tipping is that it allows them to reduce menu prices, which increases demand. Thus, restaurateurs’ decisions to keep voluntary tipping or not should ultimately depend on the relative strengths of these benefits. The more that a restaurant’s servers are overpaid relative to the back of house and the wealthier and less price-sensitive a restaurant’s customers are, the more the owner of that restaurant should consider abandoning tipping. By this reasoning, many upscale, expensive restaurants (especially those in states with no or small tip credits) probably should replace tipping with one of its alternatives.

Give and You Shall Receive: Investing in the Careers of Women Professionals

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore what organizations can do to facilitate the retention and advancement of women professionals into top leadership positions. A social exchange framework is applied to examine ways organizations can signal support for and investment in the careers of women professionals, and ultimately the long-term work relationship. Design/methodology/approach – This paper employed a qualitative methodology; specifically, semi-structured interviews with 20 women executives, in primarily the US hospitality industry, were conducted. The interviews were recorded, transcribed, and content analyzed. Findings – Organizations are likely to strengthen the retention of their female professionals if they signal support through purposeful, long-term career development that provides a sightline to the top, and ultimately creates more female role models in senior-level positions. Organizations can also signal support through offering autonomy over how work is completed, and designing infrastructures of support to sustain professionals during mid-career stages. Findings are used to present a work-exchange model of career development. Research limitations/implications – This research is an exploratory study that is limited in its scope and generalizability. Practical implications – The proposed work-exchange model can be used to comprehensively structures initiatives that would signal organizational support to – and long-term investment in – female professionals and enable them to develop their career paths within their organizations. Originality/value – Through offering a work-exchange model of career development, this paper identifies components of organizational support from a careers perspective, and highlights the factors that could potentially contribute to long-term growth and retention of women professional

Innovations in Hospitality Human Resources: Cases from the U.S. Lodging Industry

[Excerpt] Today’s hospitality and tourism companies face complex, dramatically shifting challenges, most notably the need to compete for increasingly sophisticated customers in a global, fluid marketplace. To attract and retain the loyal cadre of customers that will ensure the organization’s success, service companies such as hospitality organizations must employ technologically advanced, yet margin sensitive, product and pricing strategies and practices that will differentiate themselves to their intended market. Even more importantly, these service organizations need to devise strategies that will capture and retain the most important yet, from a financial perspective, unrecognized asset on the balance sheet: the employees that design and deliver the service to the customer base. Human resource strategists (i.e. Becker & Gerhart, 1996; Cappelli & Crocker-Hefter, 1996; O’Reilly & Pfeffer, 2000; Pfeffer, 1998; Ulrich, 1997), including those who take a hospitality perspective (i.e. Baumann, 2000; Hume, 2000; Worcester, 1999) advocate a renewed attention to the investment in employees or “human capital” as a source of strategic competitive advantage.