Management of Thorpe Park Resort (Essay Sample)

Management of Thorpe Park Resort
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Outline
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1. Executive Summary  PAGEREF _Toc387764861 \h
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2. Introduction  PAGEREF _Toc387764862 \h
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3. Human Resource  PAGEREF _Toc387764863 \h
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3.1. Recommendations  PAGEREF _Toc387764864 \h
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4. Visitor Experience and Quality  PAGEREF _Toc387764865 \h
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4.1. Recommendations  PAGEREF _Toc387764866 \h
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5. References  PAGEREF _Toc387764867 \h
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Management of Thorpe Park Resort
Executive Summary
Organizations are faced with various challenges and just like any other organization; Thorpe Park has management challenges which affect the smooth flow of operations. Such challenges need to be addressed and the necessary recommendations put in place to ensure proper running of Thorpe Park to satisfy visitors, the company workers and the managing directors. This paper focuses on some of the management challenges at Thorpe Park resort on human resources and on customers experience and quality of services offered and gives recommendations on how such challenges to be solved.
Introduction
Thorpe Park Resort is a theme Park in Chertsey, England. Thorpe Park was built in 1979 on the partially flooded gravel pit which was left after the demolition of Thorpe Park Estate in the 1930s. Thorpe Park is owned and operated by Merlin entertainments. Usually kids above eight years with parents, teens and young adults aged 16-24 who are thrill seekers are the main target audience of Thorpe Park (Thorpe and Kanade, 1990). Thorpe Park Resort now operates three yearly events. Club nights occur every Saturday night a month from April to September which features known music artists playing a variety of the themed nights. Summer Nights are held when the Park reopens after a normal day on Friday while Fright Nights is Thorpe Park's Halloween event, an annual event that has been running at Thorpe Park since 2002 (Bigné et al., 2005).
Human Resource
Human resource team in Thorpe Park is involved with recruitment, training and employee relations. It is also concerned with pensions, disciplinary policy for employees, offering of bonuses, discounts and benefits such as leave benefits. Employees are usually sponsored by their employer and are sole responsibility of Thorpe Park. Currently, Thorpe Park has more than 2000 employees of which most of them are part-time employees who range from event handlers, guides, ticket issuers, ushers and other staff member in various departments of Thorpe Park. One talks about cheap labor but if one adds all the associated costs in employing and individual and all the benefits offered associated with their package is not so low after all. As a result human resource has restrictions when it comes to recruitment and meeting the needs of its employees. The human resource at Thorpe Park is faced by various challenges. One of the challenges is insufficient background checks during recruitment which may lead to hiring employees who may not be fully competent for specific jobs. Another challenge facing human resource at Thorpe Park is that most employees complain of poor remuneration and short term employment contracts. This creates a lot of headaches for the human resource department who have to find ways of dealing with workers who demand for more pay and other forms of compensation (Gerber, 1995).
Compensation and benefits department is part of the human resource which is responsible for offering benefits to workers who reach certain targets. Some of the staff benefits in Thorpe Park include: the Merlin Magic Pass, Discount across Merlin Annual Passes and Thorpe Park Pension scheme. One of the challenges facing this department is that it has to deal with the constant increase in rents, inflation rates, currency exchange rates which do not favor employees who have meager salaries. Most workers complain of enjoying few benefits in Thorpe Park and others don’t get any benefits or compensations at all because they are not full employees. Such workers are no qualified to any pension at all. This is a challenge to the human resources who have to come up with ways of satisfying their employers through provision of various benefits. Other challenges faced by the Thorpe Park human resources is poor employee relations and inadequate worker training on specific duties and this adversely affects the performance of Thorpe Park resort. Most Thorpe Park employees are not properly trained on various duties such as guiding and properly communicating with visitors and this causes improper performance of various departments (Blondal and Pearson, 1995).
Last but not least, Thorpe Park is faced the risk of losing employees to other competitor companies. Most workers in Thorpe Park sign employment contracts which allow them to worker for a short period of time. Labour laws that ban employees from engaging into another employment agreements when they have not completed their current contract agreed time usually of one year is generally ignored in Thorpe Park. Currently, there have been frequent resignations by workers to look for jobs in other organizations. Unofficial means like gentlemen’s agreements among managers of various companies in the hospitality industry not to pouch workers until two years of employment are complete have been ignored and this leads to unexpected resignations which are detrimental to Thorpe Park performance. As a result employers are trying to control the loss of their employees as new openings appear in other competing companies (Nankervis and Stanton, 2010).
3.1. Recommendations
Thorpe Park should come up with a proper recruitment, training procedure, and better ways of satisfying their workers for them to deliver more. New workers should pass through various checkers to ensure only the most competent workers are hired to work in specific departments of Thorpe Park. Workers should be given certain training if there is need to ensure they get the necessary experience before they can be left to operate on their own. Frequent training can be offered to remind workers of various basics, which increases trust and increases the efficiency with which worker can deliver certain duties (Krakover, 2000). Thorpe Park should increase the number of full time employees as this makes workers to stop looking for other jobs and concentrate on their duties and this leads to better performance. Still the remuneration should be good enough and should be remitted in time and no worker should complain of poor pay or delayed payment (Liu, 2008). In terms of benefits and bonuses, certain group of employees who perform better should get financial and compensation benefits. These benefits include: Membership in credit unions which offer low interest rates on loans, which offer loans for emergency and disaster assistance while others offer no-interest loans for non-emergency situations. Provision of life insurance for dependents, accident insurance, accelerated death benefits, and assistance in case of terminal disease such as cancer .Commuter benefits can also be offered to offset the cost workers incur as they move from one play to other while carrying out operations of their companies. Other incentives include transport allowances, on-site Parking, Parking subsidies, carpool subsidies. Other recent developments include offering spending accounts, auto-insurance programs and company owned vehicles to their employees. Training employees through offering career development benefits are important as they both benefit the employee and the Thorpe Park Company. Employees have a chance to expound their knowledge on specific areas and this leads to creation of a better workforce which is a benefit to Thorpe Park or any company as argued by Gerber (1995).
Most organizations offer monetary benefits to their employees when they reach a certain level of performance. At that point they receive more compensation, incentive bonuses, promotions and this leads to high performance. Other incentives include: sign-on bonuses for new workers, retentions bonus for workers who stay in the organization for a considerable period and lastly referral bonuses which are offered to worker who refer and encourage visitors to use the services of the company. In addition, Thorpe Park can decide able offer technology services and discounts to their employees such as business cell phones, personal computers, iPads and internet connections and these benefits helps employees cut down the associated costs of such services (Blondal and Pearson, 1995). Leave benefits include paid time offs such as traditional vacation time, sick leave or personal days, paid sick leave where employees are who are sick are paid and this protects the employees from loss of income when they are sick. Some organizations offer stand-alone sick leave plan while others provide a paid sick leave donation program to their employees. Other employment benefits which Thorpe Park can offer to its employees include: family friendly benefits, flexible working benefits, employee’s service benefits, housing and relocation benefits and business travel benefits (Blondal and Pearson, 1995). If workers are satisfied, they like their work and deliver more and this reduces the losses associated with hiring and training new employees.
Visitor Experience and Quality
Thorpe Park is a place for family to come together in a safe, secure and attractive place where they enjoy rides, watch movies, eat ice cream walk around. The park operators are making sure that is a top notch and an up to date recreation park. Nowadays Thorpe Park has been added new ride zones which addres...