“Network Disruptions”: the impact of staff turnover on NT hotel networks

Two of our PhD students, Kalotina Halkitis and Jamie Seaton, presented overviews of their research at our seminar series last Friday (4th April). I have asked them to provide a shortr summary of what they are doing – this first one is from Kalotina – I’ve attached a copy of the presentation slides she used as well. kalotina_halkitis_staff-turnover-in-nt-hotels

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Staff turnover is a typical feature and challenge for all sectors in the Northern Territory. Tourism and the hotel sector experiences unpredictable, yet inevitable employee mobility/turnover for a number of reasons (e.g. emotional labour, and inadequate career development opportunities). Most research seems to focus on staff recruitment and retention strategies, but my PhD research is more concerned with understanding the extent to which staff turnover actually affects business performance in the hotel sector.

  

Tourism businesses like hotels rely heavily on people as they have an active role in the businesses production processes. Although some transactions (e.g. check in) are enabled by Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), the majority require and rely on people. Reliance on employees is more visible in hotels due to the nature of their hybrid offerings. The delivery of hybrid offerings such as experiences requires the input and interaction of employee expertise from a variety of departments, thus forming temporary/ad hoc operational networks. These operational networks comprise of a number of employees (actors) who are associated in numerous ways such as professional, friendship, trust and so on during which they interact by exchanging information and socially construct knowledge. In addition, the distinguishing characteristics of not only the hotel sectors offerings, namely: intangibility, perishability, inseparability and heterogeneity contribute to the information and knowledge volume and content variations challenging businesses. For example, the heterogenous service interactions between different employees and customers contribute to the intensity, breadth and depth of information or knowledge.

  

Taking into consideration the importance of people in delivering hotel offerings and the volume of information they are exposed to and/or socially produce themselves, makes “the human mind [of network members] a direct productive force, not just a decisive element of a production system” (Castells, 1996, p. 32). However, this realisation poses significant challenges to businesses experiencing relatively high staff turnover rates just like hotels do.  The situation may be exacerbated in the Northern Territory where high levels of casual employment, the remoteness of the region, internal group transfers of employees, lack of career development opportunities and so on are characteristics of the regions hotel sector.

  

By adopting the social constructivist view of knowledge creation, and theoretical postulates from the network theory, as well as organisational behaviour, we seek to understand the type of  disruptions to hotel businesses that staff turnover creates. We particularly focus on how these disruptions affect knowledge sharing and creation among individuals and social networks.