Efficiency is everything in business management, because time is money. If your operating costs are higher than they should be due to inefficiencies, your margins will be significantly lower than they could be.
A good business manager should always be considering how to make things run more smoothly, consistently, and efficiently. We'll provide some tips specifically for hotel managers on managing a hotel as efficiently as possible for the best possible margins and the happiest customers and employees.
Be good to your employees. If you are not good to your employees, they won't be good to you. Slacking off is a lot easier to justify (read: inefficiency) if an employee doesn't respect his or her boss because of poor treatment.
Respect your employees as you would like to be respected; consider your benefits package as not only critical to retention, but also critical to employee performance. This includes things like vacation time, wages, health care options, and how you deal with emergency situations when an employee has issues with things like child care or automotive problems.
A happy staff is generally a productive staff.
Room cleaning. Make sure you train your hotel employees on the quickest and most efficient way to get around a hotel room and get it clean-have a routine that they should go through each time. Have employees time themselves and offer monthly rewards for the cleanest rooms in the fastest time. Do spot checks to make sure that the rooms really are getting cleaned as they should be if you implement this, as you don't want cleanliness to suffer for efficiency's sake.
Towel waste. Allow your customers to choose whether or not they want replacement towels by leaving them on the floor if so. This is a better option for environment because you'll run fewer loads of wash, and a better option for your budget because you'll run fewer loads of wash! And you don't have to pay someone to do it as frequently!
Allow guests to reuse their towels and reduce inefficiencies as well as environmental impact
Competitive analysis. Get out of your own hotel and see how others are doing it. Look at every aspect of how they run their hotels to get tips, but also to affirm that you are doing things the way you want to be doing them.
It's important to understand what your competition is doing so that at a minimum, you can do as well as they are doing with things like cleanliness, customer service, and staff wellness.
Eliminate the cause of a problem, don't just clean it up. Look for the root cause of a problem and create a solution for it that is long-lasting, otherwise you will inevitably see the issue again, which will simply create inefficiencies. Learn from your mistakes and don't repeat them.
A good hotel manager will always seek to improve efficiencies. We've mentioned just a few tips for doing so.
A good note to self is to constantly be focused on learning from mistakes made in the hotel, and reducing waste in the process of employee time management, and you will be well on your way to improving hotel efficiencies and therefore profitability.
Cara Aley is a freelance writer who covers a wide variety of topics from digital marketing strategies to online reputation management.
