Latte Lounge Global Expansion Leading To Workplace Issues



Latte Lounge Global Expansion Leading To Workplace Issues

Introduction

Latte Lounge, a local coffee shop which opened last year, is a high end luxury cafe, catering to the 'business people' who like to work in luxury or relax in style. They have expanded their operation and now have 3 branches within the State. However, they are not doing so well ever since. They're losing their clientele, their employee absenteeism rate, and their employee turnover rate has grown steadily ever since their launch and is a major problem now. If this continues, they might have to close down soon. I worked at Latte Lounge as a waiter during the summers, as they believe in hiring fresh and young people. There I could identify several management related issues due to which they were and still are experiencing a loss in profits and going into deficit fast.

The purpose of this essay is to evaluate why they have been facing these work place issues. Along with high employee turnover and absenteeism rate, which is naturally interrupting and disrupting their promised 'smooth, efficient and quiet' services (Lee, 1988), Latte Lounge also has been experiencing crude and often violent behavior amongst their employees towards their co-workers, management and even clients.

Discussion

Identification

A high absenteeism rate amongst the workforce creates multiple problems for any organization like inconvenience for the clients due to interrupted services and work overload for the staff which is present, which is a high cost (Blau et al, 1987). Quality of services suffers as less talented and experienced employees have to step up to replace the absent employee. This leads to de-motivation for the whole workforce and eventually productivity is severely affected (Jafté et al, 1995). Moreover, employees in attendance have to work overtime to keep up with the workload, which generates additional costs for the business in terms of salaries, benefits and wages which is an extra financial burden for them (Scott, 1982).

Legitimate illness and mandatory paid leaves aside, absenteeism is basically when the employees do not show up for work as scheduled, with or without reporting to the management through proper channels. One of the biggest challenges to Latte Lounge is having to deal with such employees who as mentioned above, do not report to the proper authorities when taking an off day or worse lie to them to gain extra days off. They also do not have in place any absenteeism regulations and procedures which are very important towards regulating employee attendance, other than the other problems mentioned.

Another problem which Latte Lounge is facing is a high employee turnover rate. A leading effect of absenteeism is that the management is unable to retain their employees for long periods of time (Hom et al, 2001). This costs the business time, effort and additional cost of recruiting and training employees constantly, not counting the effect this whole process has on customer satisfaction (Tziner, 1996).

Moreover, new and old employees are showing increasingly disruptive behavior to the clients and the ...