The Olive Garden Restaurant, decorated with the olive trees, serves the traditional Italian, Greek and Mediterranean food.
“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”.
Human Resource Planning Process
In today’s world the most important aim of the workforce planning is the increase in labor productivity. As it is known, the labor productivity is an efficiency, which the organization uses the labor of its workers, capitals, materials and power resources with, in order to make a definite product or to render a definite service. An effective manager should be responsible for the organization and a workforce planning in his division or department.
Effective workforce planning in Olive Garden can be represented as a sequence of the following actions:
With the growth in the quantity of the workplaces, a competitive character of advancement grows in the restaurant sphere. The employers pay more and more attention to the competitors with the international practices and a qualitative experience in the given sphere, as well as to the initiative personal qualities.
Recruitment, Selection and Induction
The basic stage of the human resource management is recruitment, which includes, first of all, such process, as a selection of personnel. A subsequent activity of human resource management in Olive Garden depends on how this recruitment process is conducted, and what kinds of people are selected for work in the organization. Therefore, it is necessary to concern this stage seriously, considering the experience kept in domestic and foreign practices.
“Recruitment has three major purposes: 1) increase the pool of applicants with minimum cost, 2) meet the organization’s legal and social obligations concerned with the demographic make-up of its workers, 3) and assist with increasing the success rate of the selection process through the elimination of poorly qualified applicants with inadequate skills”.
The all-round complex estimation of the personnel can be fulfilled on the basis of the research of various aspects of a candidate, objective personnel data, business and moral qualities, life experience, professional knowledge and abilities, health and working capacity, office career and other aspects. Personnel recruitment represents a process of selection of the suitable candidacies for the vacant positions proceeding from an available reserve at the labor exchange.
Personnel selection includes the following elements:
– Calculation of personnel demand;
– Positions modeling;
– Professional personnel selection;
– Formation of a personnel reserve.
Training Programs for workers and managers. Identification of the need for training programs. Evaluation of the Training Programs
It is necessary for the management of the Olive Garden Restaurant to conduct a personnel training on the technological advancements more and more often. Within the last two decades the frequency, size and speed of changes have sharply increased. Technologies, globalization and organizational transformations push it and its employees to receive and use the new knowledge of the business models and software in order to remain competitive. Such an acceleration of the processes represents a dilemma for the Olive Garden Restaurant. The personnel demands the new knowledge, which is necessary to be given more often and in conditions as close as possible to the occurring changes; however, the training should be conducted within the limits of the time they can dedicate to it.
Productivity is the main goal put in front of the personnel. Training and development of the personnel are done only for the sake of its efficiency. However, HR managers often forget about the efficiency of the training itself. Speaking of the Olive Garden Restaurant’s employees, it should be noted that one of the training possibilities can be a “cut training”. It is based on the idea that the staff does not have to learn the full, detailed report about the technologies and programs; instead, they should learn only the definite aspects, which are necessary for their work tasks fulfillment. These short training programs can be easily crammed into the schedules of the restaurant’s employees, and attendance will increase because of the shortness of a program. The resulting effect is a progress in the organization’s work due to the personnel training.
Besides, corporate learning centers are also good and allow observing a qualitative breakthrough in personnel development. If the results of trainings conducted by the guest-coaches can be estimated only after some time, the results of the training at corporate university can be traced constantly, comparing, counting up and keeping statistics.
Knowledge and skills constitute a half of the success of any employee. The important role is played by his attitude: to himself, to work, to the heads, to the restaurant, to the restaurant’s aims, to subordinates and to clients.
A high job satisfaction helps companies to achieve successes in any business. In order to build an effective system of motivation, 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 the degree of adherence to the company.
Systems of performance appraisal of employees
Performance management is important for the success of the Olive Garden Restaurant. The main thing at efficiency increase is to provide the fulfillment of operations in order to satisfy the inquiries of leisure and business travelers. The organization provides clients with the services they want. Performance management is closely connected with the control of its change from the point of view of identification of adverse deviations of a labor productivity level in the definite periods of time.
Systems of payment of wages and salaries for the employees
According to the specialists, one of the major conditions of stability and business performance 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.
Having specified the income of the employee on this or that position in Olive Garden, it is possible to start modeling the wages system. A basis of such model is the calculation of an optimum wages fund, profitable for the company. Accordingly, there are a lot of mechanisms how to increase the workers’ effectiveness 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 for workers and teams will inspire the workers and give them confidence that they will get the award for an effective work. The management team, on the other hand, will feel confident 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 the 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 the 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 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 an effective development of management culture. The effective “total reward” system is the intermediary in the exchange between the company and the personnel.
Conflict Management in Olive Garden
The achievement of the goals in business directly depends on communications –interaction with partners, clients, colleagues, representatives of state structures. The skills of effective communication can provide the greatest influence and participation of the person at all stages of formation and business organization development.
The managers in the Olive Garden Restaurant should find out that the essence of the conflict is a simple dispute on the resources, different approaches to the system of values of people or just a conflict arisen owing to the mutual intolerance, and psychological incompatibility of the employees. Having clarified the causes of a conflict, the head should minimize a number of its participants. The fewer people are in the conflict, the fewer efforts are necessary for its salvation.
The development of the program of the effective communications should start from the general mark of the administrative environment. Then, it is necessary to study the organizational structure and the type of already existing communications. In order to estimate a present condition of a team and a degree of satisfaction of workers, it is necessary to conduct a small internal research and to find out what forms of communications as the most expedient and effective. It is also important for the Olive Garden Restaurant to establish the accurate criteria for the definition of information, which is the subject to distribution among the personnel. Such data can raise the degree of satisfaction in the company and stimulate labor productivity.
Teams/ Team Systems/ Team Development
In order to improve a team work in the Olive Garden Restaurant, it is necessary to create “an improvement team”. A number of the participants of the improvement team at the Olive Garden Restaurant should depend on the complexity of the current team projects. Team projects should be supervised by the team leaders. If a leader possesses all the necessary knowledge on the process optimization, methods and instruments of their implementation in the organization, then the other team members should possess the knowledge concerning the organization itself (its functions, formal structure, work methods, etc.). It is very important to pay sufficient attention to the training and professional development of the team members (documentation and analysis of the information). The main goal of the team in the Olive Garden Restaurant is to supply the management of the company with the new ideas.
To sum up the paper, it is necessary to say that human resource management plays a very important role in the Olive Garden Restaurant. Moreover, the management of the restaurant should make changes in motivation and training of its employers. Appropriate performance management, as well as the necessary measures for effective human resource management, is vital for the effective achievement of the Olive Garden Restaurant’s general goals.