No hotel can be successful without the right staff. While the property, the rooms, and the proximity of your hotel to area attractions will certainly affect a guest’s experience, their interaction with your staff members will make or break it. COVID-19 has introduced complications to staff training and guest interaction, as well. With minimal contact with guests and self-learning becoming the norm, hotel owners must find solutions to their workforce training needs. The right hotel software for training can make an enormous difference.
If you’re contemplating an investment in a new hotel PMS training solution, you’re not alone. According to a study from Expedia Group, hoteliers are increasingly making the leap to training software for several reasons:
- 19% do so to improve customer service ratings
- 71% do so to reduce guest complaints/improve the guest experience
The BDO goes on to explain things further. “Doing more with less. Every organization must find deeper levels of scale and efficiency in process, particularly in staffing. Moreover, building predictable labor models against an unprecedented selling environment has made labor-related decision-making especially challenging. It’s no secret that COVID-19 has been a catalyst to technology adoption in digitizing the guest experience.”
For hotels, this means finding a tool that enables staff to train, but that also accounts for the fallout that often comes from self-led learning. In a self-paced environment, staff members can move at their own pace, but it lacks the familiar encouragement and motivation that comes from working with an actual human trainer. A system that allows staff to train while also earning a certificate can give them a sense of motivation and achievement in these troubled times.
Why Invest in Training?
Why should you bother with providing your employees with training? For many hotel owners, the idea of continuous training is foreign. However, it can offer important benefits that ensure your guest experience stands out for all the right reasons.
Beyond the Basics
Chances are good that new hires have a day or two of orientation when they first start working at your hotel. This is their opportunity to learn the ropes, so to speak. They get to know their coworkers, get acquainted with their duties, and then they’re cut loose to sink or swim on their own. Sadly, it’s a model that often leads to less than stellar outcomes.
By moving beyond the basic training and orientation period, you’re able to help your staff members develop the skills and knowledge they need to perform their jobs flawlessly. It’s all part of helping to ensure that your team can care for guests correctly. For instance, hotel booking software training can ensure that front-desk staff not only understand how to use your booking system but can do so quickly and efficiently to streamline the guest experience.
Boost Efficiency
Your goal is for the hotel to operate smoothly, with as little friction as possible. Staff efficiency is a huge factor in achieving that goal. Training can help improve staff efficiency in many important ways, including the following:
- Familiarizing staff members with the correct process for various responsibilities
- Building familiarity with processes, software, and tools to increase employee speed and accuracy
- With improved knowledge and skills, employees are better able to anticipate guest needs and act preemptively
- As training continues, employees can work together more seamlessly, even across different departments/teams
Expanding Knowledge
Another reason to consider investing in cloud PMS training for your team is that it helps you build and expand their knowledge. Yes, your front desk staff should focus on check-in and check-out, but what if they want to move up within the business? They’ll need to master additional skills, and training is the way to do that.
When your staff members are well trained, they will have mastered the skills they need for their current positions. That allows them to perform their duties quickly and easily, but it also means that they are ready to take on additional responsibilities.
Providing ongoing training for your hotel’s staff is not just about promoting from within, either. Cross-training creates redundancies within your staff so that if someone is absent, another person can step in and fill their position without a problem. Ordinarily, pulling a staff member from one department into another can cause chaos, but with cross-training, you ensure they have a modicum of knowledge and can hit the ground running.
Employee Retention
What makes an employee stay with your hotel year after year? Job satisfaction is the reason, but many different elements go into that. Pay is one, certainly. Enjoying the environment is another.
However, one of the single most important factors in job satisfaction is a sense that your employer values you enough to invest in your growth and development. By providing ongoing training for your employees, you show that you value them and want to help them thrive. That dramatically increases job satisfaction, which increases employee retention. There are also multiple other knock-on effects here, as improved job satisfaction also affects morale, teamwork, efficiency, and even guest service.
The Role of the Automated Coaching Engine by Hotelogix
At Hotelogix, we built our automated coaching engine, or A.C.E, to help hoteliers just like you improve the quality, knowledge, and capabilities of their team members. With the onset of COVID-19, we expanded A.C.E to a contactless learning model that offers advanced training and guidance for your team members in a self-taught format.
How does it work? It’s quite simple, and yet it delivers more effective training and helps you ensure your team is ready for whatever might come their way, from the expected surge of revenge travelers throughout 2021 to guests exploring a new area for the very first time.
With A.C.E, you or your trainers can create specific certifications and learning paths designed to help your team master the knowledge and skills necessary. Each certification course includes different sections and tasks, as well as tests to evaluate the learner’s retention of the information being taught.
A.C.E is completely customizable, allowing you to select the certification tasks and even allot points for each task. Once you’ve created the certification program, assigning it to staff members is a simple process that can be handled right within the hotel PMS. Training can be conducted over a period of time, all at once, or in other ways that suit your needs and your team’s schedule.
When a staff member completes a course, they receive a certificate showing their achievement. This is an important element, as it builds a sense of accomplishment in each team member, but also provides physical confirmation that the employee has mastered important skills and knowledge.
It’s Time to Build a Better Team
COVID-19 has complicated employee training, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Hotel software training through the Hotelogix A.C.E system ensures that you’re able to build a better team, improve your staff members’ skills and knowledge, and deliver the best possible guest experience.
Ready to learn more about Hotelogix and how we can support your success? Take a free trial or request a demo with one of our experts who can show you exactly how our software can fit your needs.