Exercise

Decide whether statements 1 to 10 are true □ or false □, according to the article.

1. The writer is over forty years old. □

2. She gave up applying for jobs some time ago. □

3. She has not had much experience of working for

a living. □

4. Employers think that someone of her age is too

expensive to employ. □

5. She needs a job so that she can support her family. □

6. People don't get as angry about ageism as about

other forms of discrimination. □

7. Employers are looking for bright, ambitious people

of any age. □

8. More mature employees would be valuable assets

to many professions. □

9. People in their thirties can't get jobs in government

departments. □

10. She wants to 'repay' the State for her university

education. □

Have a nice day* employee loyalty in service firms

NEW YORK

Hotel, shop and restaurant chains, which employ thousands of people in low-paid, dead-end jobs, are discovering that high labour turnover rates resulting from the indiscriminate hiring of «cheap» workers can be extremely costly.

Cole National, a Cleveland-based firm which owns Child World, Things Remembered and other speciality shops, declared a «war for people» in an effort to recruit and keep better staff.

Employees were asked: What do you enjoy about working here? In the past year, have you thought about leaving? If so, why? How can we improve our company and create an even better place to work? Employees replied they wanted better training, better communications with their supervisors and, above all, wanted their bosses to «make me feel like I make a differ­ence». Labour turnover declined by more than half; for full time sales assistants, it declined by about a third.

Marriott Corporation, a hotels and restaurants group, has also decided to spend more money on retaining employees in the hope of spending less on finding and training new ones. In one year, it had to hire no fewer than 27,000 workers to fill 8,800 hourly- paid job slots.

To slow its labour turnover, Marriott had to get a simple message accepted throughout its operating divisions: loyal, well motivated employees make customers happy and that, in turn, creates fatter profits and happier shareholders. Improved training of middle managers helped. So did a change in bonus arrange­ments.

At the same time, Marriott became more fussy about the people it recruited. It screened out job applicants motivated mainly by money: applicants which the company pejoratively described as «pay first people». Such people form a surprisingly small, though apparently disruptive, part of the service-industry workforce. Marriott found in its employee-attitude surveys that only about 20% of its workers at Roy Rogers restaurants and about 30% of its workers at Marriott hotels regarded pay as their primary reason for working there.

Many middle managers in service industries are more com­fortable coping with demands for more money than with demands for increased recognition and better communications. They win have to change their ways. Surveys say that when 13,000 em­ployees in retail shops across America were asked to list in order the 18 reasons for working where they did, they ranked «good pay» third. In first place was «appreciation of work done», with «respect for me as a person» second.