The importance of Housekeeping in the hospitality industry is perhaps one of the most underplayed concepts. It is one of the most important departments given that maintaining the hygiene, cleanliness, aesthetics across the entire property rests on its shoulders. Acting as a direct link between the hotel and its guest experience, housekeeping in the hotel industry is never to be treated lightly.
How to improve housekeeping in hotels is a huge challenge for several independent hotels. While we may acknowledge the importance of housekeeping in hospitality industry, not many of us know how to go about making it impeccable. And this is where following a few housekeeping best practices in hotels can come in handy, as the first step towards improving your game. Using these as the steppingstone, you should look into creating a good housekeeping strategy that works best for your hotel, your staff and your guest expectations. After all, the more personalized your approach the better the results you will enjoy.
Let’s take a quick look at a few housekeeping best practices in the hotel industry:
Invest in motivating your Housekeeping staff:
Housekeeping in the hotel industry is one of the most consuming yet least appreciated jobs! So, it is no surprise that housekeeping in the hospitality industry has the highest turnover, at 31%. This is why, as the hotel owner, you need to implement measures that work in favor of your housekeeping staff.
You can make this happen by rewarding the best/most effective staff member every once in a while, arranging for regular trainings so they are up to speed with industry best practices, or even by organizing occasional employee engagement activities, which could make them feel valued and even motivated.
Grooming your hotel housekeeping staff is crucial:
You should also look into investing in grooming them into the professionals that they are. Most hotels restrict grooming to just the front desk staff or guest-facing staff and this should be avoided. In the service industry, presentation is everything and unless the housekeeping staff feel good about themselves, it is unlikely that they will be ecstatic about their job!
This is true to any other department, though. But since we are discussing housekeeping in the hotel industry, grooming is of paramount importance no matter how big or small a property you own. You could take inspiration from the Ritz Carlton motto – “We are Ladies and Gentlemen serving Ladies and Gentlemen.”
Make guest-centricity an organization-wide culture
Guest experience in today’s world is one of the most important factors that lead to the success of any hotel. (If you looking for ways to improve guest experience at your hotel, we’ve discussed this at length here and here.) Since housekeeping in the hospitality industry is so closely related to guest experience, you need to make sure that they understand the role they play and are driven to improving your hotel’s guest experience with every task that they do.
Top hotel managements are training employees to assess and identify customers’ needs even before they know it themselves. For example, if a couple is arriving with a toddler in tow, providing a highchair in the hotel room for the child’s use is a polite gesture that would speak volumes.
These were some of the housekeeping best practices in the hotel industry. But none of these will be as impactful as having a world-class hotel management system to help you better streamline and automate your housekeeping operations.
A well-designed Hotel PMS will help you manage all aspects of your hotel business from the convenience of a single dashboard. This includes streamlining communications (be it interdepartmental communications like front desk to housekeeping or intradepartmental communications like housekeeping manager to a housekeeping staff), assigning tasks, managing assigned tasks, etc.
A Hotel PMS is extremely handy especially if you often find yourself wondering ‘how to improve housekeeping service?”. A good place to start would be to look at automation as a resolution. When processes are automated, the scope for slip ups or errors is minimized to a great extent. Automation also helps save man hours while enabling your hotel staff to focus on improving guest experience. Outside of automation, here are some other ways in which a PMS can help resolve housekeeping-related woes for hoteliers:
- 1. Assign tasks to your housekeeping staff: The system allows you to assign specific tasks pertaining to specific room numbers to a certain member of your housekeeping team. This level of transparency ensures that no task is left unattended and also helps you keep track of your staff’s to-do for the day.
- 2. Manage assigned tasks: Following up on assigned tasks so you don’t have to wait for updates is also made easy. Housekeeping in hotels is all about managing multiple things without affecting guest experience. And so, having a tool to manage your tasks and time is a great idea.
- 3. Real time room status updates: Since the front desk and housekeeping both need to stay updated on room statuses, any room that has just been cleaned is marked as ‘clean’ on the system and in real-time the room is available for front desk as part of inventory. Similarly, when a guest checks out, the front desk can mark that room as ‘dirty’ so that housekeeping can get started on working on the said room.
- 4.Audit Trail: The audit trail feature allows housekeeping managers to keep track of what each member of the housekeeping department is up to. This is good as there is more accountability.
- 5.Notes or Tasks: The Notes feature helps front desk and housekeeping departments to be in sync when it comes to transparent communications. If a guest asks for a specific request that pertains to the housekeeping department, the front desk can easily pass on the message in the form of a ‘note’. And, when the task has been done, housekeeping can clear the note marking it as ‘done’.
These were just some features of the Hotelogix Property Management System, when it comes to streamlining housekeeping operations. To get a more elaborate feel of what else we have in store for you, check us out here.
When all these loose ends are tied together, your staff will be in a much better position to prioritize guest experience and will proactively work towards delighting your guests. This happens because they can now afford the time as well as the peace of mind to focus on the things that matter the most – delivering a service so good that every guest you host will be tempted to keep coming back to you for more!
Capitalize on a well-formulated housekeeping system to help keep your hotel impeccable so your hotel guests feel at home and will look forward to keep coming back to you.
