How Staff Can Increase Hotel Productivity

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.

Can we improve the productivity of our team?

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?

By ‘fat’ we mean 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.

Improving the hotel productivity by better managing shifts and flexibility

Answering these questions is the first step you need to take before assessing if your planning is stable or if you should modify anything.

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 might also be a good idea to consider offering extra employee benefits (find out more about this at the Eden Health blog) other than the government mandated ones, whether with respect to healthcare, financial incentives, workplace benefits, and more. This can help boost employee morale as well as productivity.

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.