Standard operating procedures for the hospitality industry

If you have been in the hospitality industry for a while, you will have heard of the term SOP, standard operating procedures. These simply are the standard, most effective way to do something.

Having SOPs in place help with many things such as:

• Cost control
• Service quality
• Communication
• Consistency
• Efficiency
• Onboarding/staff training
• Accountability & performance tracking
• Safety & compliance
• Risk management
• Supports sustainable practices
• Helps to create a structured work environment

These therefore benefiting both your guests & your team.

SOPs should be creating for anything that requires a system being put in place, these may be for your entire business where it would be important for all staff to understand this, such as an SOP on what to do if there was a fire.

SOPs should also be created for individual departments as it wouldn't be relevant for example for a chef to know how to conduct a guest check out.

Some examples of the typical types of SOPs you may want to put into place are:

FRONT Of HOUSE

• Check in process
• Handling of lost luggage
• Charging of items in the curio shop

MAINTENANCE

• Recycling process
• Re-gassing of an aircon
• Checking a faulty Geyser

FOOD & BEVERAGE

• Wine service
• Running the pass
• Taking a food order

HUMAN RESOURCES

• Onboarding process
• Handling a case of in toxification
• Handling performance reviews

LAUNDRY

• Guest laundry process
• Cleaning of the washing machine
• Turndown of a room

Some situations you may need to consider if having an SOP would be helpful or not, such as ''how to handle a guest complaint'' as each situation is very different, so this falls more under staff training, but you would need to use your judgement on what you feel needs a formal standard recorded.

It's vital that SOPs are explained in detail to the relevant staff members, & where necessary they sign to confirm that this has been understood & that they will follow it.

All SOPs should be filed, we would suggest a cloud-based method to avoid using lots of paper & ink. You may need one physical copy in a file per department so that they can refer to them as needed. It would also be important for this to be part of the onboarding process with new hires.

As industry professionals (in fact we have over 175 years of combined hospitality experience at Wild Dreams!) we can create SOPs for our clients, this is part of our HR admin consulting services, but also if you book staff training with us, we can include creation of SOPs for your property.

To find out more about our HR admin services head over to THIS page.

For a free consult regarding our staff training, fill in the form on THIS page.