Insight from implementation of Minimum Wage Ordinance : employee recruitment and retention in the housing management industry

Abstract

After the implementation of Statutory Minimum Wage, the manpower shortage problem in the property management field becomes more intensive, especially among frontline posts. The fight for frontline staff does not only comes within the industry, but also from other industries as well. In view of the situation, this paper tries to find out what can be done by property management companies to reduce the manpower shortage among frontline posts. The two directions – retention of existing staff and recruitment of potential new staff are investigated and discussed. This study mainly investigates the situation in large-scale property management companies as they have more resources on formulating retention and recruitment strategy. In order to know the full picture of the issue, primary data investigating the views from frontline staff and from management representatives are collected to know about the actual situation secondary data of research on past study are collected to know about the empirical background and formulate conceptual framework in the analysis. Questionnaires are distributed to 150 existing staff and 150 new recruits respectively with 103 received from existing staff and 101 received from new recruits. Besides, in order to know the opinion of management, interviews are conducted with 3 property managers from different companies on their views of the impact of statutory minimum wage, the factors which are believed to be affecting their intention and the strategies being used by their company. The survey results show that existing staff intention to stay is affected more by non-monetary factors like relationship and stress while new recruits are more attracted by monetary factors like salary and benefits. In the interview with property managers, all of them agree with that monetary factors play a more important role in the attraction of new recruits. But in the part of retention, one of the manager agrees with the view that non-monetary factors play a higher role than monetary factors while the others think that monetary factors are equally important. Based on the research result, recommendations on how to retain existing staff and to attract jobseekers.