The most popular game in town is not baccarat, but job-hopping

Imagine you are one of Macau’s six casino operators. After years of getting permits, battling bureaucracy and what-have-you, you finally break ground on your new mega-hotel-casino. Then follows the challenge of construction.

Six to eight months before your opening date, you start hiring and training your hotel staff, with all the complications that this entails. New uniforms are given out, while meals are provided and salaries paid for several months, even before the employees say their first “hello” to a guest.

Finally, the big day arrives. Your workers now know how you want guests to be treated in order to burnish your company’s image – knowledge that took months to impart.

Suddenly, you start losing employees to the competition. These are assets you have spent lots of time and money training and developing and now they have taken their skills to the hotel across the street.

This is the reality in Macau and something that is becoming more and more common. It is also unfair to hoteliers.

To understand this trend properly, I talked to hotel employees and managers to get their side of the story.

At the newest hotel-casino in town, the most common answer I got from workers betrayed just how unconcerned they are about their jobs and their employers. One told me that his colleagues were leaving the hotel “because the employee cafeteria is too far away from our workstations and we spend a lot of time walking during our breaks”.

At first I just could not believe what I had heard. But I quickly remembered that I was in Macau, where circumstances give young and inexperienced workers just embarking on their careers, base salaries as high as MOP16,000 (US$2,000) per month, yet allow them to behave irresponsibly, hopping from one hotel to another, time and time again.

Mediocrity abounds

When I talked to a hotel manager about what I had just learned, he admitted there was little management could do about it. Employees hop from one establishment to another for as little as an extra MOP200 a month. Yes, can you believe it? Just MOP200!

Let us cut to the chase. This is the result of a combination of mediocre regulations, mediocre employees and mediocre managers.

Our mediocre labour rules are hurting the hospitality industry.

The city is growing at a stunning pace but the government is not keeping up with all the needs of the industry, even though it calls Macau an “international tourism destination”. If the city really wants to become an international tourism destination, it is about time that our officials started laying the foundations for the improvement of customer service.

Then you have mediocre employees that keep hopping from hotel to hotel without realising that sooner rather than later this nonsensical game will be over. These workers are so naïve that they fail to understand that carrying on in this way will only damage their own interests in the long run.

Hotel employees should be focusing on education, training and plotting a proper career path. Instead, they chase immediate gratification. It adds no value to what they have to offer employers, and turns them into a commodity in the eyes of hotel managers. Over the long run, chasing after every extra pataca offered is not the best way to increase one’s income. Lots of short job stints on a curriculum vitae will eventually raise doubts about a job applicant’s work ethic and loyalty.

Biggest loser

Finally, mediocre managers do not know how to retain staff. Instead, they cite high employee turnover as the easiest of excuses for their failures.

It is the managers that have the power to transform the way employees think. They can show a worker the advantages and long-term benefits of sticking with their current employer instead of hopping around. If managers fail to do so, they are not doing their jobs properly.

In the final reckoning, however, the responsibility for the labour merry-go-round in the hospitality industry ultimately belongs to the hotel operators. It is the hotel operators that keep hiring these flighty workers and this thus perpetuates the problem.

Things would be different if hotels stopped hiring employees that just hop around. Things would be different if hoteliers got together once and for all to make some ground rules for the business in Macau – pending the government getting round to doing something about it.

Until that happens, the hopping game will go on, with no winners, only losers.

Gustavo Cavaliere  Hospitality industry expert – gustavo.cavaliere@gmail.com