Impact of the Concept of Organizational Communication on Tourism Manager - Case Study Example

HOW DOES THE CONCEPT OF ORGANISATIONAL COMMUNICATION IMPACT THE MODERN DAY TOURISM MANAGER IN TERMS OF ASSISTING COMMERCIAL SUCCESS? CASE STUDY Travel and tourism is a fast growing worldwide business domain. With increases in the purchasing power in the hands of the consumers, tourism spending is also increasing. The law of labour supply rightly puts forth that with rise in the wage rate, the labour supply rises but only to a certain extent. Beyond this point with further increases in the wage rate, the labour supply starts falling as wage earners prefer leisure to money. Improvement in people’s income levels and living standards when coupled with rising awareness among people for healthy living has resulted in the steady growth of the tourism industry. Even organisations in today’s time appreciate the benefits of holidays on an employee’s mind and body and thus provide them with various travel allowances. Travel Genie is a world recognized travel and tourism management company that operates almost in all places around the world. Travel Genie is a cross border player and drive efficiency across the industry through proficient systems and service standards. Apart from quality service, the key to Travel genie’s success is its team of dedicated, and highly trained members. At Travel Genie to a certain extent the planning and the decision making process is centralised. However every individual in the hierarchy willfully comes up with suggestions to bring about increased productivity. Though every single member of the organization has an important role to play, it is the tourism managers who bear the maximum responsibility for turning the business into a commercial success. One of most important criteria for bringing about success in tourism is communication. Below is a part of the organisational structure that elaborates on the details of the managerial hierarchy at Travel Genie. Fig. Organisational Structure at Travel Genie Effective strategy building can take a business to the higher levels of success and the travel industry is no exception. The managers at Travel Genie have to do a lot of brainstorming and come up with extraordinary commercial marketing strategies and when it comes to marketing, communication plays a very significant role in the travel and tourism industry. The communications manager is the key to transferring information from one party to another. Many a times it happens that information is transferred however the recipient cannot appreciate the information. Thus such transfer of information or data is not communication. It is the responsibility of the communications manager to make sure that all information and data are transferred on the right, to the right person and the recipient fully understands the purpose and the meaning of the information transferred. (Cheney G.,August 1998) The role of a communications manager is more defined in travel and tourism management company like Travel Genie which has a spread of 30 branches over the entire country of UK. The managers have to communicate constantly with each other to keep everyone updated about the happenings at the company. For instance, if the front line executive is not aware of the broad company strategy and objective, a lot of things can go wrong. While the strategy team may decide to focus on profitability of the organisation and may focus on metrics like revenue/profits per customer or per employee, the local banch manager might be more interested in increasing the total revenues of a given branch. However, this push for increasing the revenue might come at a cost – by deciding to match local players in terms of cost, the local branch manager might bring down important matrices like profitability. Though crucial decisions are taken centrally, there are always a lot of important decisions to be taken by the middle and junior level and frontline executives. The business strategy as set by the core strategic management group at Travel Genie in the initial few years was primarily growth. It is a well established fact that any company grows at a galloping rate in its first three to four years and thereafter the growth process slows down and it reaches a steady state level. After almost seven years of being into business, Travel Genie has grown to a considerable stature with 30 branches and more than 6000 employees. While during the initial 4 years travel genie was primarily focused on organic growth, the top management team over the last 2 years has changed its focus from growth to consolidation. After it has reached a certain stability point, travel genie has changed its focus from being a nimble and fast evolving company to being a process driven and highly efficient company. At this point Travel Genie has identified profitability as its primary goal in business. On this particular decision of the top management, depends the day to day business operations and smaller decisions that need to be taken. For instance, when gaining maximum profitability is the primary objective, the price sensitive masses are not to be targeted. Price sensitivity was not an issue when growth was the primary objective. The communications manager helps in disseminating information to all the employees of the organization. By making the front line executives aware of the broader business objective, the communications manger ensure that the right deals are made and the right clients are roped in. The issue of communication is a major concern for Travel Genie because it is a services company and not a product company. For a product company deciding on many parameters is very easy. Product features, pricing and delivery mechanism are all set centrally in a product’s company. However when it comes services, such specifications are not well defined. The scope, the pricing and the delivery mechanism all depends a lot on the front line managers and how the business is shaping up. Communication plays an important role in keeping the front line managers and executives aware of the business objectives. Though policies and strategies are devised by the top level managers, at the end of the day it is on the shoulders of the bottom layer of executives to get clients and keep things moving. Crisis communication is another important area which is tackled with a lot of ease by the communications manager. True crisis situations do arise keeping in mind the scale of operation of Travel Genie. Additionally, since travel genie targets premium customers who expect a high level of service, it is very important to have a very efficient crisis communication channel. There are several dimensions in business which if handled poorly, can disrupt or even destroy best efforts at managing business and retaining clients. Communication failures have the potential of bringing about a series of negative outcomes. The communications manager at Travel Genie effectively communicates information between the top managers and the executives. At Travel Genie, the focus is now completely on relationship building and communication plays a key role in it. At any cost there should not be any communication gap, because such gaps have the potential of ruining healthy relationships. By keeping in constant touch with the bottom level executives the communication manager ensures that everything moves as planned and forecasted. Communication manager is the vital cog that connects the top level management with the foot soldiers of the company. Commercial success or in other words achieving an increased bottom line is a natural consequence of smooth running of business and happy clients and the most effective tool in the hands of the modern day tourism manager is organisational communication. Travel Genie presently targets affluent customer who are considerably insensitive to price and are highly concerned about quality of service. This positioning helps Travel genie derive more profitability, higher revenue per customer and also higher revenue per employee. However, the travel management industry has a very strong unorganized sector. These smaller players have the agility of a start up, and do not have very high overhead costs. These factor help local, smaller players offer a highly personalized service, yet charge lower for their services. However, the degree of competition faced by Travel Genie varied from place to place and it was important for Travel Genie to have a very flexible framework of rules that will let its frontline sales managers price the services depending on the competition. Given this flexibility, there were communication problems among the various functions of the company, like the finance, strategy and the sales department. The role of the communications manager is critical to the\smooth functioning of the entire organisation. By ensuring a seamless exchange communication among various teams, and among the various stakeholders of the company, the communication managers increases the efficiency of the organisation. REFLECTIVE REPORT The organisation is a collection of individual team members with diverse responsibilities and deliverables. However, for an organisation to be competitive and successful, it has to ensure that all team members work in a synchronized manner and individual contributions are aligned with each other. As the organisation grows, there are added layers in the organisational structure and there is a distinct distance between the business leaders and middle level and front line managers. Also, with increasing organisational size, the number of internal as well as external stakeholders increases. All these factors make the internal and external communication mechanism in a company extremely complicated, and often, a convoluted one. This seriously hinders the efficiency of individual team members, vendors and the organisational as a whole.   The only way a geographically diverse and a complex organisation can work is though excellent and efficient channels of communication among the team members cutting across domains and functions. However, this is easier said than done as organizations are subject to a lot of market and change forces and are constantly evolving.      Unlike product companies where customer interaction policies can be set centrally, services sector companies have to be flexible while setting customer interaction policies. It is not possible to have a set of pre set rules that balances the two opposing forces – rigidity (to ensure compliance to company rules and regulations), and innovation and flexibility. Tourism being a services sector, the scope and importance of the frontline and customer facing managers is extremely high.   During the course of creating this document, I realized the degree of importance of communication towards to success of an organisation. Creating this document also helped me take a closer look into the complexities that are present in organizational communication. One of the most enriching activities for me has been the creation of the case study. One of the challenges I faced during my course was the difficulty in integrating my academic learning with the complex and fluid environment present in the corporate world. Creating the case study helped me understand the criticality of communication in tourism section to a great detail. Creating this document in general and the case study in particular helped me superimpose my understanding of academic theories onto actual, real life incidents. The set of learning I achieved through this project will help me a lot in understand the soundness of academic models and also help me contribute to my future organisation. References Cheney G., (August 1998), Some Principles for Strategic Internal Communication, retrieved March 16, 2009 from Bibliography   Cragan, J. F., and Shields, D.C. (1998), Understanding communication theory: The communicative forces for human action, Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon, retrieved March 16, 2009.      Griffin, E. (2000). A First Look at Communication Theory, (4th ed.), Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill. Pg. 259-271, retrieved March 16, 2009.      Griffin, E. (1997). A First Look at Communication Theory, (3rd ed.), New York: McGraw-Hill. Pg. 285-297, retrieved March 16, 2009.       Infante, D. A., Rancer, A. S., and Womack, D. F. (1997), Building Communication Theory, (3rd ed.). Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, retrieved March 16, 2009.       Littlejohn, S. W. (1999). Theories Of Human Communication (6th ed), Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.  retrieved March 16, 2009.       West, R., and Turner, L. H. (2000), Introducing Communication Theory: Analysis and Application. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield. retrieved March 16, 2009.        Wood, J. T. (1997). Communication Theories in Action: An Introduction, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. N/A. retrieved March 16, 2009. Read More