Running a hotel is like playing the stock market. You’re constantly making investments in new strategies, new team members and new technology to see if they pay dividends in the long-term. One of the hardest places to measure a return on investment is productivity. When methods become set, it’s difficult to know what you’re not doing right and what changes could help increase revenue.
There are a few surefire ways to increase the output of your staff, the efficiency of your hotel and, ultimately, your revenue. These tweaks are by no means minor, but they pay off in ways that are orders of magnitude greater than a quick fix.
Invest In Your Team
One of the best ways to increase productivity in the long-term is to invest in your team. Replacing staff takes a lot of time and resources while throwing a wrench in the day-to-day operations of your property. It’s better to work a little harder to ensure that your staff is happy than to have to deal with the occasionally disastrous results of a displeased team.
The problem goes beyond turnover. It’s been proven that unhappy staff do shoddier work. Gallup found that 85 percent of employees felt they were “not engaged or actively disengaged at work.” That led to an estimated $7 trillion dollars in lost productivity.
There are several ways to invest in your team that will shore up your team’s feelings of engagement at work, leading to more productive days and a better return on an investment in labor.
Providing incentives for upsells, name-drops in positive reviews and pushing other revenue drivers with guests gives employees a reason to be engaged and a return on that engagement. Training your employees on new systems, larger trends in the hotel marketplace and theories of business and management will make them feel that you are invested in them.
Encourage Communication
Your employees need to feel like they can talk to their co-workers, both on their level and higher up the chain. Providing an open line for them to reach you increases the likelihood that problems will be brought to your attention. That’s certainly preferable to a system where issues are allowed to fester until they become impossible to ignore.
Beyond that, employees who have to carry out the transactions and functions that are repeated every single day are likely to see small ways these tasks can be made more efficient.
Go Paperless
This one is a no-brainer. Removing paper costs are a quick way to cut out a big expense while saving time. The right software can automatically store information and make retrieval of that data exponentially easier. In addition, the eco-friendliness of this move is good for the Earth and your own marketing efforts.
Consider Cloud-based Property Management Systems
While we’re talking about going paperless and making communication easier, we should take a second to talk about cloud-based property management systems. A PMS that is hosted in the cloud rather than contained in a front desk computer enables quick communication between all members of your staff. Modern management software like the kind offered by StayNTouch can be accessed via smartphones and tablets, decentralizing your operation and allowing problems to be fixed that much faster.
Target Your Marketing
The data collected by any 21st-century booking engine can be put to excellent use by the property manager savvy enough to use it. Rather than trying a firehose approach of throwing your ads out alongside highly competitive search terms, it’s better to figure out who is staying at your hotel, what is important to them and why they chose your property. Once those questions are answered, ads can be targeted on platforms like Facebook to people with a similar outlook or life experience, thereby increasing your conversion rate. It doesn’t matter how good your advertising is if nobody looks at it. So, save time and figure out how to grab the type of people most likely to pause.
Ultimately, increasing productivity comes down to paring inefficiencies from the daily operations of your property. Speed bumps can come from staff that is not properly motivated to operate the hotel in an optimal way. Outdated technology can get in the way of work. Old systems might lead to slowdowns that reflect poorly on your property in an age where near-instantaneous transactions are expected. Plenty of time can be wasted time working on marketing materials for people who will never see it.
The good news is all of these things are fixable for a property manager who has set their sights on increased efficiency. With a little training, an honest look at the tech that is keeping your property afloat and a thorough accounting of your guests and their preferences, your property can run smoother than ever in the coming year.
Source:
Dismal Employee Engagement Is a Sign of Global Mismanagement: https://www.gallup.com/workplace/231668/dismal-employee-engagement-sign-global-mismanagement.aspx
