Professional Practice

Introduction

This journal reflects my theoretical learning from my academics on managerial skills that I implemented during my internship in hospitality sector. This report is based on my current internship experience in Travel Inn Hotel.

This journal presents my challenges being faced by me in my internship, development of managerial skills in facing the change management in hotel and how I was able to overcome the difficulties during change management process in my professional capacity.

My role as an ‘Assistant Manager’ in hotel is to handle different hotel operations and activities and assist the team members in delivering high performance and superior customer services to hotel guests.

Change Management in my internship organisation

The process of change management is a continuous process to supports the business operations and internal environment to be more responsive and effective than other similar competitors.

Change management is a transformative process to adopt idea, process or behaviour new to the organisation system. Change management in Travel Inn hotel is seen as a planned approach to transit the staff from an active state to a desired state for increase effectiveness in overall hotel.

It has helped to adjust the staff with ongoing changes and deal with the operational performance in the hotel internal environment (Beerel, 2009). The overall purpose of change management process for the hotel was to redefine and restructure the operational performance of its staff as jobs in hotel industry are labour intensive and the success of hotels depends on the performance of the staff in dealing with guest customers and satisfying the customers with superior and prompt service.

However, the major difficulty faced by hotel management is resistance to change by the hotel staff.

In my course of internship, the Travel Inn Hotel was undergoing change management process as the existing infrastructure was being upgraded into new customer relationship management (CRM) system which require staff to undergo training for increasing the operational performance and learning the new system and adopt new reporting structure for better response and feedback.

This was all being incorporated in the hotel culture to improving the operational activities of the staff.  The senior management extended my job role as a change agent during this change process (Cameron and Green, 2015). As a change agent my responsibility got enhanced towards implementation the new system, to encourage the staff to follow new reporting structure and avoid the employee to use old reporting structure.

Change management through Lewin 3-step model

As an intern, the first step taken by me is to introduce change to the team members, operational staff and other staff through an awareness meeting. I adopted the process of Lewin 3-step in implementing change in hotel. In the initial step of unfreezing, I communicated the need for change and the benefits associated with adoption of new system in hotel.

For preparation of this first step, I noted all the benefits that the new reporting system and CRM implementation for new way of maintaining records would be offer to the hotel staff and who would be directly affected and know the concerns for the change process. The meeting was conducted in groups with operational team, IT team, front line staff and floor managers to understand the impact of CRM and flaw in current reporting structure.

The advantages of new reporting structure were talked about like to enhance the communication between the managers and staff and to increase the response time in difficult situations through better decision. Communicating about the change helped me to know the concerns of staff to help me come with better ways to motivate the hotel staff and team members to see the change process in a positive way (Kaminski, 2011).

The result of this awareness meeting to introduce the change got support from the senior management as well as majority of the staff members.

The next phase was the transition which required me to get knowledge about the new reporting structure and to understand the knowledge and skill requirement for the CRM software. In group effort with HR team, a training session was planned with the IT professionals for the different team to understand the basic features of the system and for skill development by practicing entries into the new system to operate the CRM software.

Another session was organised with the HR personnel to understand the new reporting structure to be followed by the existing staff, thus, my effort was directed towards creating a positive culture to make the making the change long-lasting.  In the refreeze stage, the new CRM software was implemented and existing staff participated in making daily entries. Moreover, the staff initiated to follow the new reporting structure.

The increased participation from all level of organisation and involvement of senior managers in the showed that the change was well accepted by the hotel staff to achieve the operational performance and increase individual work performance and feedback mechanism.

The reporting structure has enabled the hotel to measure the progress by adopting new reporting structure and to have a positive impact of the change process (Cummings and Worley, 2014). Thus, the process of change management in Travel Inn Hotel holds significance to make transition of team members and operational staff to new process and system in restructuring the entire hotel in achieving the goal of operational performance.

The overall change process was a complex task which has demanded my role to examine the concerns of employee and managers and to plan training relevant to business operations of hotel (Pollack, and Algeo, 2014).

This change management process in my ongoing internship experience is helping me to gain an understanding of the required managerial skills which are important employability skills that would help me in my future career progression in hospitality sector.

I understood the relevance of developing problem solving and leadership skills in my professional life. I can state that this experience in the course of change management process improved my managerial skills and ability as a manager. I have learned to link my theoretical understanding of the concept of change management with the real business scenario.

 However, there is an area for improvement in gaining trust of colleagues and team members to implement change with less resistance from internal staff.

Conclusion

In my current internship in Travel Inn Hotel, my role as a change agent has helped me to deal with my fear towards the change management process.  I have realised the process of change management is essential for an organisation for its continued success in the competitive landscape.

The experience of change management was a developmental and a learning process for me in developing managerial skills like leadership skills and problem solving. I learned that change process requires continuous management support and understanding of the needs and concerns of workforce to make the change lasting and effective for both employee and organisation.

I have also learnt to handle complex situation like resistance and opposition views of staff though managing proper communication and assisting the staff in acquiring new knowledge and skills necessary for CRM and following reporting structure. This overall occurrence of change management in hotel was a learning experience for me and identified my strengths and weakness in managing organisational change in a positive way.

 References

Beerel, A. (2009) Leadership and change management. United Kingdom: Sage.

Cameron, E. and Green, M. (2015) Making sense of change management: a complete guide to the models, tools and techniques of organizational change. United Kingdom: Kogan Page Publishers.

Cummings, T. G. and Worley, C. G. (2014) Organization development and change. United States: Cengage learning.

Kaminski, J. (2011) Theory applied to informatics-Lewin’s change theory.Canadian Journal of Nursing Informatics, 6(1), pp. 1-4.

Pollack, J. and Algeo, C. (2014) A comparison of project managers and change manager involvement in organizational change project activities and stages. Journal of Modern Project Management, 2(2), pp. 8-17.