1. Because employers typically make benefits available to all employees, they may not have the motivational effects of incentive plans. Given this, list five employee behaviors you believe Hotel Paris could try to improve through an enhanced benefits plan, and explain why you chose them. The New Benefits Plan The Hotel Paris s competitive strategy is To use superior guest service to differentiate the Hotel Paris properties, and to thereby increase the length of stay and return rate of guests, and thus boost revenues and profitability. HR manager Lisa Cruz must now formulate functional policies and activities that support this competitive strategy by eliciting the required employee behaviors and competencies.

Although the Hotel Paris s benefits (in terms of things like holidays and health care) were comparable to those of other hotels, Lisa Cruz knew they weren t good enough to support the high-quality service behaviors her company sought. Indeed, the fact that they were roughly comparable to those of similar firms didn t seem to impress the Hotel Paris s employees, at least 60% of whom consistently said they were deeply dissatisfied with the benefits they were getting. Lisa s concern (with which the CFO concurred) was that dissatisfaction with benefits contributed to morale and commitment being below what they should be, and thus to inhibiting the Hotel Paris from achieving its strategic aims.

Lisa therefore turned to the task of assessing and redesigning the company s benefits plans.