In this week’s issue, the hotel managers interviewed seem to have a common problem: getting quality staff and keeping them. For years now the service industry in Ukraine has remained stuck in the “they pretend to pay us, we pretend to work” mentality of the Soviet era, with rude, unhelpful staff and lax professionalism routinely encountered across the country and examples of high quality service as rare as they are welcome.
Grumpy staff on miniscule salaries who in their own lives have had little or no personal experience of “service with a smile” have created something of a self-perpetuating stereotype that makes a big impression on foreigners encountering it and plays a significant role in fostering the often negative perception of Ukraine that continues to dog the country's efforts to sell itself internationally.
Multinationals entering the Ukrainian market have long attempted to counter this by offering extensive training in a bid to bridge the gap created by the huge deficit of employees capable of delivering international standards of service. Staff receive detailed coaching in dealing with everything from complaints to representing the company when answering the telephone in a bid to get beyond the apparent apathy that has been the industry standard for decades. It is a commendable crusade that addresses a wide array of cultural hang-ups and in many ways strikes at the very foundations of the holdover mentalities which can make life in modern Ukraine a sometimes infuriating and paradoxical experience.
Unfortunately, many of the companies offering this much needed training have found that once their staff have been suitably educated, the overwhelming tendency is for them to use their new-found skills to acquire a better job elsewhere. With demand for quality service industry personnel now soaring as incomes rocket and Ukraine welcomes increasing numbers of international business and tourism traffic, it is very much an employee's market, with a constant deficit creating endless vacancies that allow staff to climb the corporate ladder without remaining within any given company long enough to earn promotion through the ranks on merit.
This lack of what could be termed corporate loyalty remains understandably frustrating for the organisations investing in the training programmes that other people are ultimately benefiting from, but as long as hotels, restaurants and other service industry mainstays continue to mushroom, it looks set to continue. The end result will be better service standards for all of us, but for the time being companies offering training opportunities will inevitably be forced to introduce all sorts of contractual handcuffs to prevent their investment in their employees from being abused by ambitious and unscrupulous staff.
Hopefully at some point along the way a critical mass will be achieved and the whole concept of training people to be polite to clients and offer ordinary folk the kind of common courtesies that most Westerners take for granted will in itself seem dated and become redundant. That day remains a long way off, but given the current tendency for staff to view training opportunities as a fast track to personal gain rather than a laudable commitment to their future on the part of their employer, the domestic service industry is slowly but surely moving away from the whole “service with a scowl” concept, which can only help make Ukraine a more pleasant place to live or visit.
