Background

This course project is an individual assignment. You will be preparing a compensation plan for a start-up boutique hotel chain preparing to launch in five locations across the country. These new hotels are currently under construction in Manhattan, Chicago, Miami, Houston, and Los Angeles, and are expected to open in about 5 months. The hotels are small, 50 to 100 rooms depending on the city, and luxurious. The hotels will appeal to a select clientele. The marketing approach taken by the hotels is being defined and is not part of this assignment.

The CEO of your new organization believes in a very collaborative approach to management. They also believe that everyone in the organization should be working on stretch assignments. Your task force is the first to receive this stretch assignment, which is the Course Project.

Process

You are to work to develop a recommendation for compensation packages for soon-to-be employees of the five hotels. The CEO has not been very clear about how the hotels will be staffed, figuring that you can figure out what the positions would be, leaving the number of employees in each position to be determined. They have directed that they want the hotel staff compensation to be higher than average, maybe in the top 25 percentile. They also want the compensation to be adjusted for the local cost of living. Everyone's compensation is to have some bonus potential based on the profitability of the locations at which they work.

Assignment

Although there could be several positions in a hotel, you are to concentrate on the four positions they deem most important to run the hotels. You are to develop a plan for total compensation of these four required positions; not just salary.

Research some ways of developing compensation plans. There is some good material on this in Chapter 7 of our text. A good example can also be found at the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM).

Develop a strategy and plan for conducting the final recommendations, due in Week 8. Create an outline or table with the schedule of how the project will be done. Include a breakdown of the tasks, a date the tasks are to be completed. Create this in one Word document. Submit this assignment to Project Part 1.

One thing that you will probably need for your project is job descriptions of the four positions that will be the subject of your study. You can find job descriptions on the Internet. As long as you correctly cite your sources and appropriately identify quotations, you may use the descriptions verbatim.