Employers Get Candid About Compensation
Understanding compensation is about more than just tracking dollars and cents: it’s also about the larger workplace culture against which employees assess the value of their pay. If they feel overworked and underappreciated, it will take higher wages to keep them on. If they enjoy the work and they like their colleagues (and their bosses), and if they feel that their job aligns with their principles, the work takes on an intrinsic value over and above their base pay.
At the intersection of a tight labour market and a grim economic outlook, employers have to get creative in how they build and maintain a compensation culture that balances their business interests against the expectations of their staff.
In parallel with our recently released compensation dashboard, Tourism HR Canada interviewed 75 tourism operators from across the country to explore how employers are making decisions around compensation. We wanted to understand how the pandemic has reshaped the business landscape for the sector, and how operators are adapting to this changed (and changing) context. These interviews touched on a number of important dimensions relating to staffing challenges and compensation, and the first report from these interviews will be available soon. It focuses on some of the high-level trends and strategies that emerged in the analysis, and highlights some directions the tourism sector will need to steer towards to recalibrate to the new normal.
Watch for this report in the coming weeks.
Tracking Operational Challenges Heading Into Summer
Additionally, the latest business intelligence survey report will also be available shortly. This is the third in a series of bi-annual surveys tracking business operating conditions across the tourism sector and its five industry groups, providing a detailed series of snapshots of the sector’s continued recovery and recalibration.
Businesses continue to face operational challenges related to finances and staffing levels, with some marked increases from January to April 2023. Strategies to improve recruitment and retention are broadly consistent with the previous survey, although businesses have shifted some of their energies towards improving work-life balance and reaching out more intentionally to under-represented groups.
Keep an eye on the next Tourism HR Insider for more details about these reports, and for the next Labour Force Survey report (providing an analysis of May 2023).