LABOUR PRODUCTIVITY, WORK FLEXIBILITY, AND INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION IN HOTELS

There has been a longstanding concern to understand the UK productivity gap, that is, why its economic performance lags behind that of many leading international competitors. Initially, an undue focus on manufacturing at the expense of the service sector limited the ability of researchers to address this question. Although this has been partly rectified by recent research on services, some sectors continue to be neglected including hotels, even though they account for significant shares of UK jobs and output.

This project focuses specifically on labour productivity, and aims to analyse the extent to which this is determined by flexible work practices within hotels, and the employment of migrant workers, both of which are important and contentious areas of policy and business practice in the UK. We also examine the extent to which there is a relationship between work flexibility and the employment of migrants, and how the interaction between these influences firm performance.

Much of the existing research on productivity has been constrained by the limitations of secondary data. This has been problematic given that researchers increasingly emphasise that the key to the productivity gap is to be found not in sectoral averages, but in 'heterogeneity' or the variance between establishments. While recent research on hotels has focused more on individual establishments, their findings have still been limited by data constraints: a lack of data at the departmental level within hotels; reliance on annual or, at best, monthly data that fail to capture seasonality, weekday/weekend and other temporal variations; and reliance on perceptions of performance rather than actual measurements of inputs and outputs. Even where more objective data are available, these often tend to be for financial measures of outputs, rather than physical outcomes (rooms let and serviced, meals served etc) which is a critical weakness in an industry characterised by strong, and potentially distorting, pricing practices.

This project benefits from privileged access to a unique data base for three large companies, with some 80 hotels, which provide data not just at the hotel level, or even at departmental level, but at individual employee level. Data is recorded on an hourly basis for different types of labour inputs (part time, contracted, seasonal etc) over a continuous five year period. Outputs are measured in both physical and financial terms, while the availability of data for 2007-12 also allows analysis of how firms have responded to a changing operating environment through the current economic crisis.

In addition to its academic contribution, the project will contribute to policies and practices seeking to enhance hotel performance, by identifying key intervention points in relation to work flexibility and migrant employment, in a sector with a poor and uneven productivity record. This will be maximized by working closely with the companies included in the data set, while also engaging with industry-wide bodies throughout the research.

The research is timely because of the insights it will provide into some of the key determinants of productivity in an important sector at a time when prolonged economic crisis has highlighted issues relating to UK economic competitiveness. It is also timely because it will be able to provide exceptionally detailed analyses of migrant employment and flexibility, and the relationships between these at a highly disaggregated scale, and to model how these are related to labour productivity. These issues have been prominent in a range of policy discourses covering migration, supply side policies, and industrial relations in the UK.

This project will impact on a number of practice, policy and academic domains related to productivity, work flexibility, and migrant employment. The potential of previous research to understanding the relationships between these three research domains has been constrained because they have tended to be fragmented in terms of focus, methodologies and data sources. There has also been an unhelpful divide, at times, between hospitality and broader social science research agendas. The main impacts will be the following:

i. Research partners interface. We aim to involve eProductive and the three hotel companies at an early stage as co-producers of the research in terms of identifying key questions and issues to be investigated in our analyses. We have already obtained commitments from all the industry partners not only to allow access to the data held by eProductive but also to commit to shaping detailed research questions, and the interpretation of the findings. We also plan eight interviews with each company (repeat interviews with HQ and three hotels) which will provide further opportunities to engage staff from across the company, and not only at the central executive level. Presenting the findings of the research at a workshop for the three companies will provide opportunities to think through the broader practice and policy implications of the research in terms of different types of work flexibility, and the variability of productivity across different organizational and time scales.

ii Hotel industry interface. The main research findings will be disseminated in two ways. First, through virtual and paper circulation of briefing notes to the leading sector associations for hotels: Master Innholders, Institute of Hospitality, British Hospitality Association, and HOSPA. Secondly, via a workshop to disseminate the findings to representatives of these associations and to draw out policy and practice implications for wider circulation. Lockwood, who is currently Chair of the Executive Council and Board of Trustees of the Institute of Hospitality, will take on the role of Communications Director for the project. The main benefits for the industry lie in learning about, and contributing to understanding of, the influence of different forms of work flexibility and migrant employment on firm performance.

iii. Academic-policy maker interface. The main contact points for impacting on policy are DBIS and DCMS. Williams had contact with representatives from DBIS through his involvement with two AIM programmes on productivity and innovation. Surrey has contacts with DCMS related to its leading role in UK research on tourism and hospitality. The research will make an input into high profile and pressing debates about a) flexibility and performance, b) the contribution of international migration to the UK economy, and c) the economic consequences of the UK's non-EU migration policies for productivity.

iii. Academic community interface. This will be pursued at two main levels. First through a rigorous programme of academic publishing and conference papers aimed at a variety of groups (e.g. BAM, I-CHRIE, AIEST). We plan to publish a minimum of 4 key papers in high impact journals, in both hospitality and broader social science journals, in order to engage academics across a range of disciplines and research areas. Secondly, through an end-of-project symposium which will bring together academics, policy makers and the hotel sector. We aim to contribute to linking the debates around flexibility, migrant employment and performance by grounding these in a systematic and detailed empirical analysis. The project has its core in management studies and labour studies, but also connects to research on industrial relations, migration, and economic sociology.