The Importance of Attitude & Appearance in Retail

The importance of attitude and appearance in the service encounter in retail and hospitality – HRM Essential Reading Notes

What Is This Paper About? – About the survey undertaken

The survey reported in this paper examines the nature and importance of the range of skills required by employers in the retail and hospitality industries
Much research has focused on attempts by organisations to inculcate the right kind of attitude in their front-line employees. This paper points to the increasing importance not just of having employees with the right attitudes, but also possessing aesthetic skills. The emergence of aesthetic skills reflects the growing importance of aesthetic labour in interactive services. That is, employers' increasingly desire that employees should have the right appearance in that they look good and sound right in the service encounter in retail and hospitality.
Evidence from questionnaires suggests that employers in the retail and hospitality industries are not generally looking for hard technical skills in their front-line personnel, but rather soft skills.

Why Is This Research Important? – Statistics of how big retail & hospitality really is

Service jobs now account for around three quarters of all jobs in the UK, with retail and hospitality alone providing nearly 5 million jobs (HtF, 2003; Working Futures, 2004).

The shifting skills terrain and the emergence of aesthetic labour
In interactive service work, such as that of retail and hospitality, a pattern is emerging of employers' skill demands. With respect to sales and personal services work, Jackson et al. (2002) point out that in their analysis of job adverts, the skills stated as necessary by employers are "social skills" and "personal characteristics". Likewise, a recent examination of nearly 100 human resource professionals in the USA responsible for hiring entry-level hospitality industry employees revealed that the top two criteria were: pride in appearance and good attitude (Martin and Grove, 2002). it is enough to note that companies employ people with certain capacities and attributes that favourably appeal to customers' visual or aural senses, and which are then developed through training and/or monitoring. It has become translated in the popular imagination as those people who are employed on the basis of "looking good" and/or "sounding right" (Warhurst and Nickson, 2001). In looking good or sounding right, employees, then, are potentially offering competitive advantage in relation to both the process of service and the service encounter (in other words doing the work); and equally becoming an integral part of the tangible product (that is, literally embodying the image of the company). (e.g. Virgin Airlines?)

Initial research carried out for the paper suggests:

the study found that the need to look good and sound right did exist and was very important to employers in retail and hospitality. These employers believed that having staff that look good and/or sound right not only helped their companies create a distinct image on the high street, but also provided competitive advantage in the crowded retail and hospitality industries. The study revealed that companies sought and developed employees who could become the physical embodiment of the image and "personality" of those companies. As one respondent stated about her company's recruitment and selection, they wanted: "... people that look the part... fit in with the whole concept of the hotel" (cited in Nickson et al. 2001, p. 180).

The Findings:

RECRUITMENT & SELECTION

in customer service work, recruitment and selection is more likely to be based on people's social and aesthetic skills rather than technical skills (Warhurst et al, 2000). Thus, managers' preference for recruitment and selection in service work has tended to be on the basis of personality and increasingly, as we have argued, aesthetics and self-presentation. It is of course noteworthy that it is at the recruitment and selection stage that employers have most opportunity to "filter out" those who are considered inappropriate for the company image.

In service work the social composition of the producers is part of the product. Employers seek employees with personal characteristics likely to make them interact spontaneously and perform effectively. Thus, as we suggested earlier sociability, self-presentation, friendliness, drive, honest/integrity, conscientious and adaptability are more important selection criteria than technical skills. To discern such characteristics and attributes most of the surveyed organisations relied on the so-called "classic trio" of application forms (79 per cent) and/or CVs (74 per cent), interviews (89 per cent) and references (60 per cent).

The interview remains popular with managers and applicants alike, as it is simple, quick and cheap - despite reliability and validity concerns. It also fulfils a social function, enabling recruitees' social, and we would argue, aesthetic aspects to be assessed

Importance of image and appearance

Asked to assess the centrality of employee appearance to the success of the business, 53 per cent of the sample felt it was critical, 40 per cent felt it was important, and 6 per cent somewhat important. Thus, at least 93 per cent of respondents attributed significant importance to the image of customer-facing staff. Only one respondent suggested that the appearance of customer-facing staff had no importance to business success.

SO WHAT DO EMPLOYERS LOOK FOR?

On the question of what employers are looking for in front-line or customer-facing staff 65 per cent suggested that the right personality was critical, with the remainder of respondents suggesting this aspect was important. Equally, 33 per cent of the employers surveyed felt that the right appearance was critical and 57 per cent as important, only 2 per cent of respondents felt it was not important. These figures can be compared to qualifications, with only 1 per cent of employers seeing qualifications as critical, 19 per cent felt it was important and 40 per cent suggested it was not important at all for selecting their customer-facing staff.

it is clear that employers place a far greater emphasis on "softer" skills for customer-facing staff. If the respondents who felt that the "soft" skills were either critical or important are combined then 99 per cent of respondents felt that social and interpersonal skills were felt to be of at least significant importance, and 98 per cent felt likewise about self-presentation skills. Conversely, only 48 per cent of employers felt that technical skills were important in their customer-facing skills, with 40 per cent suggesting it was somewhat important and 16 per cent suggesting they were not important at all. The skills that matter to employers in customer-facing staff are therefore "soft", and for both aspects - social and self-presentation, not technical.

CRITICISMS OF THIS APPROACH
With employees now becoming a crucial part of the company image and service quality strategies of service companies there is the potential for judgements about the "right" kind of employee to be seen to be discriminatory (see also Prewitt, 2003). Indeed, there is active debate in the USA and other countries such as Australia, as to whether "lookism" should take its place along with sexism, racism and ageism as one of the potentially discriminatory aspects of the contemporary workplace (Valenti, 2003). For policy-makers there is a need to ensure that vocational training provision is cognisant of the skills needed in the contemporary service workplace. For example, the importance employee attitudes have been recognised, with social and interpersonal skills already featuring within vocational education and training (see Westwood, 2004).