What are hotel staff?
Hotel staff are the people responsible for running your hotel. From those responsible for daily operations, to those friendly faces at the front desk who greet guests and help take care of their needs, to housekeeping, managers and those working in the hotel bar or restaurant - everyone plays a key part.
Types of hotel staff positions
Each role is fundamental to shaping the guest's experience. Let’s look at the key positions and their responsibilities.
Front desk staff
Front desk are the eyes and ears of your operations. They’re the ones who help shape a guest’s first impression as they are often the first people guests meet when they arrive at the hotel. They are the ones who take care of check-ins and checkouts, handle reservation requests, answer questions and help to point guests in the right direction.
If your hotel doesn’t have concierge services, your front desk staff will often be the ones helping to arrange tours to local attractions and book different hotel services. You can think of the front desk like the command center: everything starts here.
Housekeeping staff
Housekeeping are the hotel staff who ensure that the hotel is clean and sanitized on a regular basis. Beyond taking care of daily room cleaning, they also keep common areas and other facilities throughout the hotel clean and tidy. This role is crucial to ensuring a positive impression of your hotel, and positively impacts the guest experience.
Maintenance
The maintenance team often works hand in hand with housekeeping to ensure the facilities are working as well as they should be. They may help take care of routine maintenance, as well as address requests that come up through the day - whether it’s a problem with a light bulb that went out or fixing a toilet that doesn’t flush. Similarly to housekeeping, maintenace are key to upkeeping the hotel’s appearance, and are there to ensure everything is working as it should.
Managers
Hotel managers have various levels, depending on the size of your hotel. If it’s a smaller hotel, there may only be one general manager, whereas larger hotels often have multiple managerial roles. That said, the General Manager is usually the one in charge of overseeing the whole hotel operations, including coordinating meetings and training to ensure staff are doing what they should to provide the best experience possible. They are usually involved in larger more strategic decisions.
Marketing coordinator
The marketing team oversees advertising, customer outreach and promotional campaigns. They play a key role in acquiring new clients, retaining existing ones and portraying the hotel’s brand identity on the different promotional channels. They will develop and carry out marketing strategies to reach larger hotel KPIs for occupancy rates, revenue and profitability.
Food and Beverage
The food and beverage staff are the ones in charge of running the hotel’s bar and restaurant. Food and beverage staff can be the chef, waitstaff, bartenders, and sous chefs. They are the ones preparing meals and drinks and helping to provide stellar experiences for hotel dining and room service.
How to hire the best members for your staff
Your hotel is only as good as your team, and the better your team works together, the better your hotel will run. It’s therefore in your hotel’s best interest to hire the best staff, but how exactly do you do it?
You can start by defining the characteristics that identify the type of staff you would want at your hotel. Maybe they’re extroverted, have great attention to detail, are driven, self-motivated, and like to work in a team environment. When it comes time to hire staff, make sure they embody these characteristics that are an important part of your brand identity.
To attract the best talent, you’ll also want to put together an attractive benefits package. This could include flexible schedules, vacation days, health and wellness benefits, and perhaps most importantly, things that will help your staff develop and grow like training. Ultimately, if you invest in them, they’ll invest in you.
Building the perfect team of hotel staff
In the hospitality sector, your employees are the face of the brand. This industry is incredibly customer-driven, so making sure hotel clients are met with well-trained, experienced employees can be the difference between a three-star and a five-star rating, as well as the difference between you and your competition.
Plus, the better trained your staff, the more capable they are of handling anything that customers throw at them, as well as making sure complaints get turned into positive experiences.
The importance of keeping hotel staff engaged
The best way to create the perfect team is to make sure employees are engaged and satisfied. Happy employees will better represent your brand and keep up your brand’s reputation. This can be achieved through creating a positive working environment, offering regular training, promotions and giving staff performance-based rewards.
In an industry with a 73.8% staff turnover rate, it’s fundamental to keep your hotel staff motivated with this growth-minded environment. This way, they’re far more likely to stick around to succeed within the company instead of going elsewhere and will be better equipped to promote the business. Working together as a team, staff can drive revenue, upsell and promote guest retention.
Front desk staff who are happy at their job will be more likely to interact positively with clients and make sure they have the best experience possible. They will ask for feedback and inform clients of discounts if they book on site for a future trip. In the same way, knowledgeable hotel restaurant staff will be better able to understand the clients. If they are wine connoisseurs, they will upsell to a better wine, or if they are deciding between a vegetable entree or a steak, they can wisely and smoothly convince them to order the more expensive item.
How to manage your team of hotel staff efficiently
Managing staff efficiently is one of the secrets of a successful business. Here we have laid out some tips on how to better manage your team.
Tools are key to efficiency
With so many moving parts, managing the front-office, reservations, housekeeping and more, you need a hospitality operations platform that will do the grunt work for you. Using the right PMS is key to efficiency because you can streamline different components of the operations. Automating processes allows high-level management to focus less on the day-to-day operations, and more on strategic revenue-driven decisions. Pro tip: Invest in a tool that helps with revenue management, reservations, and takes care of front office operations and housekeeping all in one.
Delegate
The key to delegating is that you can combine forces to get things done. By delegating, each employee is aware of what they need to get done, and everyone is working together for a common goal. When tasks are clearly laid out, hotel managers can stop micro-managing and oversee the departments as a whole instead.
Instead of reporting directly to the manager, your employees can report to the head of the department. Creating a middle-management structure is also helpful for employees’ growth because they will have the organizational structure in place to be able to grow within the company.
In delegating, managers should empower their employees to make decisions despite the consequences of making a mistake. Ultimately, there is no better way to learn than by learning from your mistakes; it’s a great path to success.
Communication is key
There is nothing more frustrating and alienating for hotel staff than feeling like they’re not a part of what’s going on in the hotel’s day-to-day happenings. This is why communication is so important across all teams, especially for those who work the night shift meaning they don’t regularly interact with other staff members and can sometimes feel out of the loop.
Brief, regular meetings that involve all departments are not only efficient, but they also help staff feel like they’re a part of the team. In turn, this makes them more accountable and motivates them to work harder.
Being in regular contact with your team also helps prevent mistakes from happening because you can catch them before they become a problem. Managers should check in with their staff regularly, addressing any concerns, making sure they are aware of procedures and that instructions are laid out clearly.
This can be achieved through regular training, internal communication, and one-on-one meetings with employees to see how they’re doing and help answer any questions.
Positive reinforcement
The idea behind positive reinforcement is focusing on what your employees are doing right, rather than what they are doing wrong. In this way, you’re motivating your staff to do well with the knowledge that doing so results in praise and reward.
In terms of praise, make sure your staff’s achievements are recognized company wide, inspiring other colleagues to do the same. You can reward employees in many ways, from something as simple as free company merchandise to giving them days off, discounts, or pay rewards for achieving their goals.
Create a sense of community
Creating a sense of community among your entire hotel staff is crucial to managing efficiently. To create this environment, make sure everyone knows what their tasks are and how to achieve them best. Working together for a common goal ultimately helps people to bond.
Once you’ve got your team working together, the next step is to make sure you give them feedback on how it’s going. Quantify their favorable results. Is the hotel getting better reviews? Is your revenue increasing? Being transparent and letting your staff be aware of common successes gives them a sense of purpose and allows them to feel motivated by the hotel’s mission. They will work together better to make the guest's experience seamless.
Conclusion
Employees who work together as a team are more productive and efficient. As a manager, your job is to inspire your employees to do the best job they can by rewarding their successes and giving positive reinforcement. If you don’t respect your employees, they’ll find another hotel that will.
Other secrets behind managing exceptional hotel staff are to delegate, encourage communication, utilize tools that streamline hotel operations, and create a sense of community. Your hotel will only flourish if your staff flourishes, so it makes sense to give them the tools to do so. With a series of clear processes and systemized operations, you will without a doubt ensure boosted revenue, glowing reviews and better guest retention rates.
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