With the arrival of the warmer weather, hotels not only have to be ready for the guest traveler, but managers in the hospitality industry also have to manage employee vacation requests. This is a situation that can quickly become a nightmare if you do not have a plan in place. This happens quite often with lower-level managers in the industry, as they simply have no idea the mess an unorganized vacation schedule can create for an operations department.
Sit Down with Your Managers
When it comes to managing time off, you can never be too sure of anything. Whether you are a general manager, food and beverage director, or even a banquet manager, sit down with your managers to go over summer projections and vacation policies. You need to be able to dial into busy periods that will have to be blacked out as well as set limits on how many employees can go on vacation at any given time.
These communications should not be limited to operational managers, either. The sales department should be included in these meetings because the booking of business can and will be impacted by this. It will help them steer business away from periods where you expect more vacations and direct it to periods when you know you have a full staff. It will also enable them to alert you extra staff may be needed during a specific time that would otherwise be able to be covered when staff is on vacation.
Planning Vacations/Blackout Periods
This taps into the point made above in that you need to accurately forecast the business for the entire summer to ensure employee vacations do not put the operation at risk. You will no doubt have busy times during the summer where it will be all-hands-on-deck. Identify these periods and post them so the staff can plan accordingly.
FCFS
Vacations should run on a first-come, first serve basis. You can run with variations of this, but the vacation of someone that told you two months ago should not be discarded for someone with seniority that tells you the week before the date they want off. This is a policy that should be covered during the hiring process as well as something that can be mentioned throughout the year when heavy vacation requests are expected.
Ask for Flexibility and Reward It
In some cases, merely juggling the schedule a bit will help cover vacation requests. For instance, you have a full complement of evening workers but have two vacation requests for your daytime shift. Ask your evening shift workers if they can move over to day work to cover those specific periods. You can even offer a pay differential to make it more attractive to them.
Hotels generally have an ample supply of part-time workers available to them. As soon as you have your vacation requests, reach out to your part-timers to see if they are interested in pulling full shifts for a week or more. This enables you to cover shifts without having to use a temp agency.
If it becomes a worst-case scenario where you underestimate staffing or late business pops up and you do need to use a staffing agency, get your request in as soon as possible to reserve the best possible staff. The last thing you want is a skeleton chain with temp workers that have never worked at your property, especially when it comes to banquet service.
Do you find that year-after-year, your management team or certain members of your management team are completely unprepared for vacation season? Whether it is a department head or executive committee members, Joseph David International can help you find the hospitality managers you need to take your operation to the next level. For more information about our hospitality recruiting services, please click here or give us a call at 480-719-7217.
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