The hotel sector is working with increasingly tighter margins, and more aggressive competition is trying to get the better of us. That’s why it is important to squeeze the most out of resources and try to make more from less.
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Before we look to staff to improve hotel productivity, we need to ask ourselves the following questions:
- Have we defined what tasks each employee should complete on their shift? What tasks does each department have? Have we measured how long these tasks take and how much they cost?
- Do we have the advanced management tools we need to control our business’ activity?
- Do we know what the business’ ‘fat’ is?
With ‘fat’ we refer to the activities or behaviours that could slow staff down when completing their tasks, generating idle periods of time, bottlenecks, and repetitive tasks. In other words, it is the time that an employee does not have a specific task to do and spends it doing unproductive activities.
Answering these questions is the first step you need to take before assessing if your planning is stable or if you should modify anything.
Improving Hotel Productivity
You need to determine the number of bookings you have and get an idea of the influx; these figures will indicate how many staff members you need on the team, and whether to include more or fewer shifts.
When we talk about flexibility, we’re referring to the dynamism related to assigning shifts and working hours to hotel employees, in accordance with the tasks foreseen.
The hotel does not have the solvency needed to always bear the same costs when it comes to paying staff wages. At times when there is more work, the costs associated with keeping staff are incredibly high.
To avoid this, flexi-time can be employed, where a given number of work hours are placed in a ‘bank’ for busier periods, and employees are not required to work during quieter times. This ‘bank‘ helps keep a control, trying to ensure that the employee is productive during the period of time that they are contracted, paying them extra hours where necessary.
It’s important that the hotel works with advanced management tools to control everything mentioned above and assign tasks to employees, manage incidents and special working hours, etc.
With these key factors, our hotel productivity is improved thanks to good staff management.
