Case study on arise: a destination for a day spa

ARISE is a spa which provides services to its clients by mainly focussing on the health benefits including fitness, well being and spa treatment. It was founded by Kirsten Chambers, who successfully ran the firm ABOARD before selling it in the year 2007, who mainly focussed on clients who aspired to experience luxurious destination spas but had little time to spare on spa holidays.

Twyla Thompson was the Vice President – Business Operations and was overall responsible for running the business. The spa was struggling to meet the ever expensive costs and one of the main problems was the high attrition rate. This was despite the fact that the turnover rate was 31% for ARISE wherein the spa market turnover rate was 75%.

The main problem faced by this organization was to decrease turnover and boost employee morale and strive to recover the losses incurred by ARISE. One way to further decrease the attrition rate would be to enhance the current pay and compensation package and also retain the full time and permanent employees. This is a vital step for the company to retain its employees as the later stages witnessed extremely low tips for the PWCs from clients. The human resource team needs to be actively involved in trying to find out the needs and desires of the workers and accordingly reframe some human resource management policies like developing a better pay and compensation package, encouraging the use of non financial motivators like reinforcements in the form of thank you note, praises, emails etc. by superiors and building a favourable organizational climate (Ogaboh & Ushie, 19). The above practices will help to boost employee morale. The organization should also provide enough break time to the personal wellness coaches (PWCs) because they are engaged in multitasking. This will help to retail loyal customers. The organization had witnessed a dip in client reactions towards spa treatment with 60% clients complaining or leaving a negative feedback.

Increased focus needs to be paid on time management because it has been observed that clients are picked up late and sometimes their treatment hours overlap with each other. A roster must be kept for the same and the operations and human resource team needs to work to ensure that customers are provided their services in time and not made to wait (Jones & Dent, 54).

The All Star Team Plan devised by Thompson is a very innovative move as it encourages building a competitive organizational climate thereby boosting employee engagement and morale. Moreover a feedback from the PWCs was taken and most of them liked the competitive atmosphere. Also it helps the management to recognize key employees and once this is done efforts should be made to retain them. Moreover employees can manage time while working harmoniously in groups. Also each group should have a team leader and best teams can be rewarded. At the same time, the team leader and human resource personnel should look out for excellent employee performance and reward them accordingly. This can be done by taking regular feedbacks from the clients. This will make the clients and the employees engaged and will also boost employee morale and enhance job satisfaction. In a way, this plan devised by Thompson helped in enhancing the morale of the internal employees and also the tips from the clients had increased as more and more clients were satisfied with the services. But, the objective for one single team to serve each client was yet to be attained.

For Arise to function well and increase its profits, both the employees and the consumers are supposed to be pleased. For customers, their comfort depends on the participation of the staff. The organization being a spa, customers are usually very demanding and react very bitterly to imperfection. The reaction of the employees in the spa was responsible for the decrease in the number of customers. With the spa losing its experienced employees the rate at which the customers trickled in was assumed that would drop.

In the spa business clients have an expertise bonding with the staff. This means that if a staff member leaves the organization, then they would exit with their client. This is one of the reasons there has been low customer turnout at the spa. However, the spa could still maximize its profits by creating experts from the existing employees. Another approach could be outsourcing expert to cater for executive clients and offer training to the staff. In words by Plunket outsourcing of experts may be useful to the learning staff members who need a role model to motivate them (87).

Arise spa should also consider changing the human resource structure. They should create a structure that will build a team and a family. Employees should be given a home at their workplace. This will go a long way in ensuring that the sap retains its top staff members. The structure should also be in a way that the client consumer relationship. This will create a culture that will motivate both the client and the employee. The spa should create an employee team that has a foundation within the organization.

Finally, minor changes are necessary in the manner the human resource team was functioning. First, the spa needed to establish an efficient two way communication process to further boost employee participation and morale. The human resource team needed to be sensitive towards the problems of the employees especially PWCs as they were multitasking. Also the human resource team should promote a favourable and competitive organizational climate by encouraging non monetary incentive structures which will decrease cost and at the same time increase employee morale.

Works cited:

Jones, Peter & Dent, Michael. “ Improving Service: Managing Response Time in Hospitality Operations”. International Journal of Operations and Production Management. 14. 5(1994): 52 – 58. Print.
Ogaboh, A. M. A. & Ushie, E. M. “ Motivational incentives and staff turnover in the hospitality industry in Cross River State, Nigeria”. Global Journal of Management and Business Research. 10. 8(2010): 18 – 28. Print.
Plunket, W. (2008). . New York: Cengage Learning