In May’s message from our CEO and Chief Architect Mike Pnematicatos, he shares his thoughts on developing new habits to improve the work-life balance. Mike believes that Stephen R. Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” gives excellent guidance to help us “Sharpen the Saw”.

But what about our habits at work? How can we improve our productivity, and what practices can we implement to stay in shape workwise?

In his article for Hotel Financial Coach, David Lund looks at the leading productivity killers you should avoid and suggests ways to improve. As he points out, your productivity will never be perfect, but you can make things better.

1 Stop aiming for perfection

Perfection is an excellent thing if you’re purchasing a diamond, landing on the moon, or shooting a hole-in-one. At your resort, not so much. Being a perfectionist irritates the rest of the team and wastes valuable time. We want to aim towards the sweet spot of very good because it is efficient and agreeable to practically everyone.

2 Working Without a Routine

Regardless of their situation, everyone can benefit from a routine to be more productive. At your resort, the key to ensuring that everyone has theirs is for you to lead by example and model the process. Lund recommends that you keep an eye out for those who mistakenly say that multitasking is king when you’re doing this.

3 Failing to capture DnDs

Your housekeepers are most likely the most significant part of your resort’s labour engine. So it would help if you concentrated on anything you can do to increase productivity around the hours per room occupied. The Merlin Software Housekeeping WebApp, which works on a team member’s Android device, can assist with this by:

Provides data on the room status allowing for: 

• Priorities
• Guest requests
• Do not disturb
• Arrivals
• Departures
• Stay-overs and 
• Assigning rooms to be cleaned in real-time

Employee management features include:

• Start and stop of shifts
• Break times
• Location of housekeepers in the resort.
• The time spent in each apartment and 
• Compliance with the resort’s COVID19 checklist

With the WebApp, improved front desk visibility leads to better management of guest expectations with clear room status and post-checkout log of lost and found items.

While the ability to advise maintenance teams of tasks and create housekeeping duties ensures all staff are aware of their jobs to complete. Supervisors can manage these tasks and perform room checks once tasks display as complete.

With improved visibility of the duties requiring completion, the housekeepers can record the status of rooms and other areas. This ensures the disruption to guests is kept to a minimum, and time wasted reporting and awaiting information from supervisors all lead to a more efficient team.

4 Failing to Use a Current Daily Rooms Forecast

You’re missing out on opportunities to finetune and increase revenue if your schedules are based on the weekly forecast and not updated daily.

5 Schedule based on minuses rather than pluses

When a successful housekeeping manager was asked the secret behind her high productivity figures, she stated two things: first, it is a daily occurrence, and second, she scheduled using the minus sign rather than the plus sign.

What does this mean?

If the algorithm showed she needed 15 housekeepers to flip the units tomorrow, she only scheduled 14, not 16. Most managers would book an extra person or two. However, she explained that, with very few exceptions, it is always possible to complete a task with one fewer person rather than one more.

6 A lack of regular effective communication

All employees need to be aware of what is going on. Effective communication across all resort departments is essential daily. You can avoid extra costs and offering poor service for things that could have been discovered earlier and dealt with more efficiently. If you’re flying by the seat of your pants, you’ll get lousy gas mileage.

7 Additional Snack, Smoke, and Bathroom Breaks

Smokers will always find a way (and time) to head outside to the smoking area. So, plan for them and add additional breaks with strict guidelines (for the smokers and non-smokers) into the working day. 

8 Not Using Productivity Measures to Track and Schedule

You’re missing out if you’re not using tools to track your labour effectiveness on a daily, weekly, monthly, and annual basis. As Peter Drucker explains: “You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” and labour costs and percentages don’t cut it in this case.

9 Smartphones, social media, text messages, and email

Find a way to control your staff accessing and spending time on their devices and electronic communications. Yes, Lund admits this is difficult, akin to finding the Holy Grail, but productivity will always be impacted when staff can access their emails and social media.

If you have managed to achieve this, we’d love to hear from you.

10 Rewarding guests for saving you time and money

If guests want to have their apartments cleaned and fresh towels every day, you must respect their preferences. However, why not reward them for choosing not to have this service? It will make them happy and save you money. 

But don’t just add points to their account. Instead, reward them with something of high perceived value but low costs to you, such as a complimentary cocktail, a snack, or a late checkout. Stay away from more free points by being inventive.

If you’d like to learn more about the Merlin Housekeeping WebApp and other ways that Merlin can improve your team’s productivity, then contact Mark Thomas at markt@quickmerlin.com or sign up for a demo.