Erica, the human resource manager, was frustrated by many of her hotel staff speaking Spanish in the hallways and rooms as they were cleaning them.
The Sawmill Hotel where Erica works is situated in Minneapolis, Minnesota’s downtown. It’s target market includes sports enthusiasts attending nearby professional (Twins, Vikings, Timberwolves, Wild) games but also business professionals and families. This four-star hotel features an indoor and outdoor swimming pool, message center, three stores, two restaurants, and a beauty shop. Total staff includes about 10 managers, 30 cleaning assistants to take care of rooms, 10 front desk specialists, and 25 who are involved with the stores, restaurants, and beauty shops. Each are required to focus on customer service as their number one value.
Erica hires everyone in the hotel except for the Chief Executive Officer, Vice President of Finance, and Vice President of Marketing. For the rest of the managers, the 30 cleaning assistants, store, restaurant, and beauty shop workers, she advertises for openings with the local job service and the Minneapolis Tribune (with the associated website). A typical Tribune ad for a cleaning assistant reads as follows: Cleaning Assistants Wanted, Sawmill Hotel, $9-11 hour, prepare rooms for customers and prepare laundry. Contact: Erica Hollie, Human Resource Manager, xxx-xxx-xxxx.
As a result of the advertising, Erica has been able to obtain good help through the local target market. Twenty seven of the thirty cleaning assistants are women. Twenty of the thirty have a Hispanic background. Of the Hispanics, all can speak English at varying levels.
Rachel, the lead cleaning assistant believes that maximizing communication among employees helps the assistants become more productive and stable within the hotel system. She uses both English and Spanish to talk to assistants under her. Spanish is useful with many assistants because they know Spanish much better than English. Spanish also is the “good friends” language that allows the Spanish speakers to freely catch up on each other’s affairs that motivates them to stay working at the hotel. The use of the Spanish language among cleaning assistants had been common practice among them for two years since the hotel opened.
In the last few months, top management decided to have an even greater focus on customer service by ensuring customer comment cards are available in each room and at the front desk. Customers also can comment about their stay at the hotel online.
There have been several customer complaints that cleaning assistants have been laughing about them behind their back in Spanish. One customer, Kathy, thought that staffers negatively commented about her tight pink stretch pants covering her overweight legs. Other customers have complained they didn’t think asking staff for help was easy given the amount of Spanish spoken. In all, about 15 out of 42 complaints in a typical month were associated with the use of the Spanish language.
Though Bellhops and front desk clerks are typically the workers who handle complaints first, Erica, the human resource manager, has the main responsibility to notify workers about customer complaint patterns and to set policy in dealing with the complaints. The prevalence of complaints concerning workers speaking Spanish each month led Erica to make a significant change in policy concerning the use of Spanish. In consultation with top management, Erica instituted the following employee handbook policy effective immediately:
“English is the main language spoken at the hotel. Any communication among employees shall be in English. Use of Spanish or other languages is prohibited unless specifically requested by management or the customer.”
In an e-mail explanation for the new policy, Erica stated the number of complaints that had come from the use of Spanish and the need for customer courtesy and communication.
Rachel immediately responded to Erica’s e-mail by stating that the new policy was too harsh on the native Spanish speaking assistants at the hotel. She thought that a better policy is to allow her assistants to communicate with each other through Spanish but by quietly doing so away from customer earshot. If there is a general discussion in front of a customer, it is recommended to speak English. There should never be discussions in any language about customer appearances.
Though Rachel grumbled, the policy stuck because Erica and top management wanted to stop customer complaints. As a result of the policy, ten of the twenty Spanish speaking assistants quit within two months. These were high quality assistants who had been with the hotel since the start. Their replacements came from a job service and have not worked out as well in their performance.
Questions and Answers
What law(s) do you think might apply in this case?
Should a complete ban of Spanish be instituted among staff of the hotel unless customers use Spanish themselves or should the use of Spanish be completely allowed by staff among themselves as long as it is quiet (why or why not)?
What rules, if any would you put into effect in this situation, knowing about the customer complaints? Explain your answer.
In: Operations Management
In: Math
A not-for-profit organization receives $150 from a donor. The donor receives two tickets to a theater show and an acknowledgment in the theater program. The tickets have afair market value of $100. What amount is recorded as contribution revenue?
|
a. |
$0 |
|
b. |
$50, answer |
|
c. |
$100 |
|
d. |
$150 |
please explain why and how to get the answer.
2. In Year 1, Gamma, a not-for-profit organization, deposited at a bank $1,000,000 given to it by a donor to purchase endowment securities. The principal of this contribution is not to be spent according to the donor's restrictions. The securities were purchased January 2, Year 2. At December 31, Year 1, the bank recorded
$2,000 interest on the deposit. In accordance with the bequest, this $2,000 was used to finance ongoing program expenses in March Year 2. At December 31, Year 1, what amount of the bank balance should be included as current assets in Gamma's classified balance sheet?
|
a. |
$0 |
|
b. |
$2,000, answer |
|
c. |
$1,000,000 |
|
d. |
$1,002,000 |
please explain why is 2000.
3. Cancer Educators, a not-for-profit organization, incurred costs of $10,000 when it combined program functions with fund-raising functions. Which of the following cost allocations might Cancer report in its statement of activities?
Program Fund Raising General
|
a. |
$0 |
$0 |
$10,000 |
|
b. |
$0 |
$6,000 |
$4,000 |
|
c. |
$6,000 |
$4,000 |
$0, answer |
|
d. |
$10,000 |
$0 |
$0 |
please explain why and how to get it thanks!
In: Accounting
Theoretical question:
What is the Research Purpose, Objective, and Design?
Also: What is the sampling method & size, data collection method as well as data analysis & Presentation?
The American Conservatory theater, a major repertory theater located in San Francisco, was completing its tenth season. The management team at ACT decided to conduct a major research study, intended to help their planning effort. A questionnaire was deceloped and mailed to their approximately 9,000 season subscribers. A return rate of 40% was obtained. A sample of 982 of these turned questionnaires was selected for analysis.
One of the major interest ACT management was in developing an understanding of the dynamics of the process whereby individuals became ACT subscriber. To assist in this process, whereby individuals became ACT suscribers. To assist in this this process, the sample was divided into four different groups according to their behavior pattern over the 5 seasons.
1. Continual subscriber (32%)- subscribed all 10 seasons
2. Gradual 31%- one or more seasons of attendance followed by becoming a suscriber
3. Sudden 21%- became a subscriber without attending prior performance
4. miscellaneous patterns 21%
The existence of a substantial "sudden subscriber" group was surprising and ran counter to conventional belief among theater managers that people were first enticed to attend a few performances at a particular theater and only after they had some positive experiences with this theater would they become suscribers.
The next step in the research study was to attempt to identify characteristics of the continual, gradual, and sudden subscriber groups that might be of use in understanding the segment differences and as inputs in the development of audience building and retention programs. Five variables appeared to be useful in this regard.
1. Years resident in the San Francisco Bay Area, measured on a scale ranging from 1= two years or less to 5= more than 20 years.
2 Age of suscribers, measured on a scale ranging from 1=25 years old or less to 5= more than 65 years old.
3.Household income, measured on a scale ranging from 1=50,000 per year.
4. whether the subscriber spend more than 20 hours each week watching TV, measured as a dummy variable: 1 if yes, 0 ifno
5. attendence at 6 other institutions that is ballet, civic light, opera, DeYoung museum, museum of modern art, opera, and symphony. The attendance score is the number of the six different activities that the respondent attended at least once in the previous year
In: Economics
In January 2017, Mitzu Co. pays $2,700,000 for a tract of land with two buildings on it. It plans to demolish Building 1 and build a new store in its place. Building 2 will be a company office; it is appraised at $570,000, with a useful life of 20 years and a $85,000 salvage value. A lighted parking lot near Building 1 has improvements (Land Improvements 1) valued at $570,000 that are expected to last another 19 years with no salvage value. Without the buildings and improvements, the tract of land is valued at $1,860,000. The company also incurs the following additional costs:
| Cost to demolish Building 1 | $ | 346,400 | |
| Cost of additional land grading | 187,400 | ||
| Cost to construct new building (Building 3), having a useful life of 25 years and a $398,000 salvage value | 2,242,000 | ||
| Cost of new land improvements (Land Improvements 2) near Building 2 having a 20-year useful life and no salvage value |
178,000 |
Journal entry worksheet
Record the cost of the plant assets, paid in cash.
In: Accounting
1. The affordable method in establishing a total promotional budget for a company is based on:
A. How much the company can afford to spend on the promotional mix.
B. How much customers can afford to spend on the company’s product.
C. How much money it takes to reach all of the customers in the target market.
D. How much money is spent in average per each customer who makes a purchase.
2. Which of the following is not a method of determining a promotional budget?
A. The affordable methods
B. The percentage of sales methods
C. The competitive parity method
D. The competitive advantage method
3. The mix of promotional tools changes as the product goes through different stages in its lifecycle. This is because:
A. customers should rely on more than one method of promotion at each stage to make promotion effective.
B. customers view of the product differently and different communication strategies are necessary to emphasize the various elements of a product in each stage of the life cycle.
C. customers need reinforcement by multiple methods.
D. customers are generally skeptical of advertising.
4. A major hotel chain has implemented a very easy to use kiosk for check in. A recent ad for the hotel shows a business customer arriving at the hotel and using one of the kiosks to check in and retrieve a room key in less than a minute. This advertising is most likely to be executed as:
A. Lifestyle
B. Personality
C. Slice of life
D. Fantasy
In: Economics
8. Peter Griffin calculates that his portfolio's risk, as measured by the standard deviation, is 19.67%. His portfolio is made up of many stocks from just two companies, South Park Company and Quahog Company. South Park Co.'s returns have a standard deviation of 12.9% and Quahog Co.'s returns have a standard deviation of 28.84%. If the weight of Quahog Co. in his portfolio is 48.21%, what is the correlation between the returns of Quahog and South Park.
9.
A portfolio has an excess return of 15.9 % and a standard deviation of 15.23 %. What is the Sharpe Ratio for this portfolio?
In: Finance
3. Design and draw a circuit using the cascade system to operate two cylinders (A and B) which, on the operation of a start valve, produces the sequence A – B + B – A+. The cylinders should park in the positions B – A + when the start switch is in the ‘off’ position.
4. Modify the circuit designed for question 3 to provide an emergency stop which will park both cylinders in the extended position (i.e. A + B +).
5. Modify the circuit designed for question 3 to provide a fail safe. The fail safe should:
(a) act in the event of a reduced pressure at inlet to the group selecting valve
(b) park the cylinders in the retracted position
In: Mechanical Engineering
A pontoon on granite in a park has maximum weight of 12 people or 1776 Ib . if mean weight for men is 172 Ib each standard deviation of 29 Ib.
a)find the probability if an individual man is randomly selected, his weight will be greater than 148 Ib.
b)Find the probability that 8 random selected men will have mean greater than 222Ib( hence total weight exceeds the maximum capacity pontoon
In: Statistics and Probability
|
No. of Products |
Total Variable Costs, $ |
Total Costs $ |
Average Fixed Cost $ |
Average Variable Cost $ |
Average Total Cost $ |
Marginal Cost$ |
|
0 |
0 |
|||||
|
1 |
12 |
|||||
|
2 |
20 |
|||||
|
3 |
24 |
|||||
|
4 |
27 |
|||||
|
5 |
40 |
|||||
|
6 |
65 |
|||||
|
7 |
98 |
In: Economics