Hotel Management - Tick Tock Goes The Clock
Jon Sholter
Today in less than 3 minutes we are going to cover: Why measuring your labour through technology is a no brainer.
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Are you running an efficient hotel from a labour perspective? How do you know? As an owner are you wondering how to compare yourself to others? As a Manager, are you tired of higher ups telling you to cut labour without knowing where you stand?
Does the above paragraph have too many question marks? Can I write a sentence without a question mark?
Many hoteliers measure their labour from a percentage of income standpoint. However, this metric has almost nothing to do with how well you are managing labour and more to do with how healthy your hotel and market is overall. Meaning, it is hard to extrapolate anything actionable from this data.
Leading to the question, what to do instead?
Hoteliers need to be able to track their variable labour effectively, let's look at the housekeeping department as an example. Instead of measuring this as a percentage of income, wouldn't it be better to know how many minutes per room or cost per room occupied this department is achieving?
Going Further.
Would it be beneficial to have labour metrics (stayover vs checkout cleans) built out and standardized across your portfolio for similar service level hotels? Although variables between hotels need to be considered, the answer has to be yes! Using this basis of calculation will help eliminate ourselves from falling into the trap of saying labour is too high, without actually comparing apples to apples.
Let's summarize some benefits to measuring labour effectively:
You can tell if your hotel is hitting labour metrics based on your labour plans as oppose to Occupancy/ADR influences.
You can compare properties effectively across your portfolio so you can truly identify labour inefficiencies between them.
You can ensure your schedules are made in a way that adhere to your labour plans, so efficiencies are created before they even get measured.
You can track individual employee performance to see which Team Members are in need of more coaching/training.
That's a lot of you can's!
Technology for this functionality has existed for awhile, but many of us have not taken the time to implement them in our organizations. If this is you, what are you waiting for? Remember, if you don't measure it, you won't save it.