An Appreciative Inquiry into Employee Retention in Hospitality

Employee retention has been a longstanding challenge for the hospitality industry. The current body of literature robustly discusses these challenges and their underlying causes. However, less attention has been paid to the development of retention strategies that incorporate employee and leader perspectives, to identifying positive attributes of hospitality for retention, and to exploring the deeper meaning of retention for employees. Accordingly, this thesis aimed to explore what is working, what workers want, and what can be done to improve employee retention by identifying key strengths-based retention practices that hospitality leaders can design to increase employee retention rates. Following the Appreciative Inquiry (AI) methodology, I conducted interviews with frontline hospitality employees and hosted a World Café with hospitality leaders and academics. Through my sub-questions, I identified nine themes that influence hospitality employees’ retention decisions and nine retention practices designed to increase employee retention rates. These findings suggest that the key strengths-based retention practices hospitality leaders can design to improve employee retention are not singular actions; it is an overarching retention practice that (a) robustly understands employee preferences, (b) leverages the reasons why employees come to and stay in hospitality as the strengths of industry for retention, and (c) weaves retention into organizational culture. Accordingly, this study concludes with a recommendation for leaders to use retention interviews to gain a deeper understanding of their employees and to inform the implementation of a retention practice throughout the organization, which can then evolve iteratively in an employee retention system.Keywords: hospitality, retention, practice, strategy, employee preferences, strengths, culture, AI, management, leadership, positive, solutions-oriented