The Olive Garden Restaurant, decorated with olive trees, serves the traditional Italian, Greek, and Mediterranean cuisine.
“Olive Garden is the leading restaurant in the Italian dining segment with more than 750 restaurants, more than 88,000 employees and more than $3 billion in annual sales. Olive Garden is a division of Darden Restaurants, Inc. (NYSE: DRI), the world’s largest full-service restaurant operating company. In 2011, Darden became the first full-service restaurant company ever to be named to the FORTUNE “100 Best Companies to Work For” list. Olive Garden is committed to making a difference in the lives of others in the local community” (Olive Garden, 2012).
Main Body
According to the specialists, one of the major conditions of stability, business performance, and the absence of the employees’ turnover is the presence of the balanced system of personnel motivation. Being one of the most financially capacious directions of management, this system, first of all, should be urgent for the Olive Garden Restaurant from the point of view of the main task decision.
Specialists note that, often, employees work not effectively because of trivial emotional neglect of the profit of proprietors. According to the researches, the main reason of a low activity and efficiency of the personnel and a high employees’ turnover is the absence of the possibility to make a career path.
“Owners must choose to ask for workforce development plans in proposals, structure contracts to support workforce development, establish training standards, and do business only with contractors who invest in their workforce. Owners should address training costs in the contract to establish a clear understanding with contractors regarding who will pay these costs, how, and when. Contractors and Contractor Associations must invest in, support, and push the implementation process in order to upgrade the skills of the construction workforce. This includes improving the construction industry image, recruitment, and retention, as well as making training a standard practice. Contractors must analyze specific training needs and invest training funds where they will provide the most impact. Contractors should develop career progression programs, consider a pay-for-skills approach to compensation, and work with owners to develop evaluation methods to assess program effectiveness” (Pappas, 2004, p. 63).
There are a lot of mechanisms how to increase the workers’ effectiveness and to lower the employees’ turnover in the Olive Garden Restaurant. First of all, it is necessary to support the team leadership in the company, and, secondly, to introduce a well-developed system of performance and reward management.
The accurate mechanism of motivation and estimation of the results of workers and teams will inspire the confidence in the Olive Garden Restaurant that they will get the award for an effective work, and the management will feel confidence that the goals achievement will be performed with the greatest diligence and productivity.
Moreover, the work of an administrative board of the Olive Garden Restaurant is inseparably connected with the realization of performance management and reward system for team leaders. The general performance of the company and its departments’ substantially depend on the employees’ motivation. Therefore, the personnel motivation, training, retention’ and awards should be taken into consideration together with a general controlling system of the company.
It is necessary for the Olive Garden Restaurant to start modeling a reward system for teams as well as for separate employees. A reward system is very important. First of all, it focuses the organizational behavior of the company on itself. The organizational behavior is a really important thing which is done by the heads of any enterprise. The organizational behavior considers the features of a performance management system. The brightest manifestation of the company’s organizational behavior is the reward system and reward management. The reward system can be a vector of the effective cultural change capable to cause a substational development of management culture. The effective “total reward” system is the intermediary in the exchange between the company and the personnel.
Thus, the long-term programs of the development for employees gain a paramount value as abilities and qualifications of the personnel are necessary for the constant improving. Along with it, many experts in the sphere of human resources (HR) argue that existing systems for talent management of the organization should be improved. Thus, the majority of the workers consider that the volume of a personnel reserve in their organization should be increased. The others note that shortcomings of a corporate culture of the Olive Garden Restraurant are at the bottom of the employees’ high turnover. Some pay attention to the violations and shortcomings of the framework of the personnel competence of the Olive Garden Restaurant.
In order to promote not only professional, but also personal development and career growth to enhance the person on a higher level of maturity, special programs are necessary. The methods of transforming training are effectively used for the realization of the development programs. The basic idea of this approach is to shift participants of the program from “a comfortable zone” to “a risk field”; it allows them to see their strengths and weaknesses more accurately.
“One of the strengths of the company – level data is that two indicators are available to assess training productivity – wages and job-performance ratings. The overall incidence and days of training have a significant positive effect on wage growth, even after selection bias in assignment to training is eliminated. Employees receiving training are more likely to receive higher subsequent performance ratings. A relative salary is used to select employees for career advancement or remedial training and that each type of training leads to higher wage growth” (Phipps, 1996, p.33).
With the growth of the number of workplaces, a competitive character of career advancement grows in the Olive Garden Restaurant. The employers pay more and more attention to the competitors with the international knowledge, a practical experience in the given sphere, and initiative personal qualities. A career growth in the Olive Garden Restaurant represents a list of the personal management achievements.
Human resource management’s function in the Olive Garden Restaurant is strategically integrated with the Olive Garden Restaurant’s own policy as the preparation of the effective personnel is the functional business process of human resource department. It is directed at the ensuring of the continuity of the administrative personnel, prevention of the problems arising in case of the top managers’ terminations of employment contracts, the professional growth, and careers of the employees. A carefully fulfilled selection and a target development of managers are defined by the need of human resource development for the enterprise as a strategic task fixed in its mission. Thus, the administrative skills and so-called “key qualifications” are considered at any level of the hierarchy.
It is necessary for the management of the Olive Garden Restaurant to conduct personnel training more and more often using the developments of high technologies. Within the last two decades, the frequency, size, and speed of changes have sharply increased in the company. Technologies, globalization, and organizational transformations push it and its employees to make careers, to receive, and use new knowledge, business models, and software in order to remain competitive.
A high job satisfaction helps the Olive Garden Restaurant to achieve success in the catering business. In order to avoid high employees turnover, it is necessary to analyze the motives of people occupied in the Olive Garden Restaurant, to estimate the level of their satisfaction of work and their desires to make careers. The Olive Garden Restaurant’s personnel development model includes the following stages: attraction of the perspective personnel – determination and revealing of leaders – development of leaders – an effective usage of their capabilities – retention of the perspective employees in the restaurant.
Conclusion
To sum up the paper, it is necessary to say that organizational behavior plays a very important role in the Olive Garden Restaurant. Moreover, the management of the restaurant should make necessary cultural changes as well as the changes in motivation, training, and career growth of its employers. At an early career stage, the results are characterized by a low adherence to the organization and cause a high employees turnover. The middle career stage shows that the results are contradictory: sometimes, the satisfaction with the work and the quality of the fulfilled work are interconnected both positively and negatively. The late career stage is characterized by the adherence to the organization.