Toward Business Improvement through Employee-Customer Engagement in the Hotel Industry: Human-Sigma Approach

This study aims to measure the employee and the customer engagement using the Human Sigma approach as an attempt toward hotel business performance improvement. This is a comparative study conducted between two hotel settings, namely chain hotels and independent hotels in Egypt. Two different structured surveys were used to collect data. A random sample of 272 employees and 177 customers was chosen for investigation from 17 hotels (six independent hotels and eleven chain hotels). The findings revealed that the independent hotels reported low levels of both employee engagement and customer engagement than those of the chain hotels. Moreover, all of the chain hotels fall in a relatively high human sigma band (HS3) than those of independent hotels (HS2). These results provide hotel business an opportunity to work toward increasing engagement levels of both employees and customers. It also presents empirical evidence on applying the human sigma approach in the hotel industry.