The hotel industry is operating with increasingly tight margins and facing aggressive competition that will try to outdo us. This is where the importance of making the most of our resources comes into play—trying to do more with less.
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Can we improve our team’s productivity?
To increase the hotel’s productivity through its staff, we would first need to ask ourselves a series of questions, such as the following:
- Have we broken down each employee’s tasks by shift and by department? Have we measured those tasks based on the time it may take to complete them, while also taking into account the costs of performing them?
- Do we have advanced tools to monitor business activity?
- Do we know what the “fat” in the business is?
By “waste,” we were referring to those activities or behaviors that could hinder staff productivity by creating downtime, bottlenecks, repetitive tasks… In other words, it refers to the time an employee spends without a specific task to perform; instead, they may be engaged in unproductive activities.
Improving Hotel Productivity Through Better Shift Management and Flexibility
Answering the questions above will be the first step to take before assessing whether our schedule is stable or if we need to make a few adjustments.
We’ll need to determine how many reservations we have and make a rough estimate of the number of guests; depending on the numbers, we’ll have either more or fewer staff on the team, working more or fewer shifts.
When we talk about flexibility, we’re referring to the ability to dynamically assign shifts and schedules to hotel employees based on the expected level of activity at any given time.
The hotel does not have the financial resources to consistently cover the same costs when it comes to paying employee salaries. During peak periods, the costs of retaining staff would skyrocket.
To avoid this, there is what is known as an “hour bank”; this concept refers to weeks when fewer hours are worked. In this way, those hours will be offset by the hours worked during weeks when more hours are needed. The “hour bank” helps maintain control, ensuring that the employee actually works for the period for which they were hired, with overtime pay provided if necessary.
To effectively manage all of the above, it will be important for the hotel to use advanced management tools; this will allow it to assign tasks to employees, handle incidents, manage special schedules, and so on.
By following these guidelines, we will improve the hotel’s productivity through effective employee management.
