We have all been there… you get the phone call from corporate you are going to be audited in a week and everyone scrambles to fix everything that has been going wrong for months. Out of nowhere, money becomes available for labor and massive forces of temps are called in to scrub the floors, wipe down the walls, and help get the department organized before corporate shows up with their checklist. Sadly, that very situation is exactly what goes on in hundreds, if not thousands, of hotels across the country.
Audits Versus Guest Satisfaction
As a hotel manager, this attitude and behavior were very frustrating. I was as guilty as the next person in that when we were crunched for staff, things would sometimes be let go and before you know it, the back of the house is a mess. Honestly, that was the culture of the upper-level management when I first started in the hotel industry and I allowed it to infect me as well. Only after my first official corporate audit did I realize just how harmful it was to the overall operation.
There is simply one question you need to ask yourself if any of this sounds familiar… Are you trying to satisfy corporate or are you trying to satisfy the guest?
Create the Right Culture
Everything starts at the top, as briefly hinted above. When I started out, I let things go because my boss, without realizing it, was teaching me this was acceptable. I changed the culture of my department because I was disgusted by what I saw when it came time for a corporate audit. I felt very strongly that if we were willing to put in this type of effort for corporate, we should be working even harder for our guests.
While I will not pretend everything was perfect all the time, my department did a much better job of being organized and clean and staying that way as we moved forward. All it took was a retraining of the culture in the department and that included how I acted and worked. Rather than allowing housemen to just drop skirts in the midst of a big change, we got them to fold them properly and hang them up. Rather than just pushing a podium in the back hallway only to be forgotten, it was back in its proper holding place by the end of the day.
My supervisors and I taught our team how to work smarter, not necessarily harder. However, the biggest change came in setting time goals for specific duties to make better use of their time on the clock. Instead of handing them a worksheet that needed to be done by the end of the day, they were handed a sheet with times for each duty, then we made use of their extra time by doing extra cleaning or extra organizing in areas that needed it.
When servers had downtime, instead of just sitting in the back of the room chatting, they were organizing shelves, wiping down equipment, or setting up the next day’s functions.
Again, while everything was far from perfect, we were far better prepared when a corporate audit was ordered than we had ever been before. More importantly, we no longer had to bring in outside help because the boss was in a state of panic.
A good measuring stick is if you would be comfortable with a guest walking through the back of the house at that exact moment. If not, then you have cleaning and organizing to do. Simply put, you can make excuses as to why your property would fail an audit at that given moment or you can do something about it.
Are your managers letting you down? Is the property in a state of disarray and are you either failing or barely passing audits? If you need better managers to take your operation to the next level, JDI can help. As one of the top-rated hotel recruiters in the country, we don’t just find a candidate, we find the ideal candidate for your specific needs. For more information about our client services, please click here.