Tick Tock Goes The Clock

Today, we will cover why using technology to measure labour is a no-brainer.

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Are you running an efficient hotel from a labour perspective? How do you know?

As an owner, are you wondering how to compare yourself to others? As a Manager, are you tired of higher-ups telling you to cut labour without knowing where you stand?

Do the above paragraphs have too many question marks? Can I write a sentence without a question mark?

Many hoteliers measure their labour from a percentage of income standpoint. However, this metric has almost nothing to do with how well you are managing labour and more to do with how healthy your hotel and market are overall. Meaning, it is hard to extrapolate anything actionable from this data.

Leading to the question, what to do instead?

Hoteliers need to be able to track their variable labour effectively, let's look at the housekeeping department as an example. Instead of measuring this as a percentage of income, wouldn't it be better to know how many minutes and/or cost per room occupied by this department is achieved?

Going Further.

Would it be beneficial to have labour metrics (stayover vs checkout cleans) built out and standardized across your portfolio for similar service-level hotels? Although variables between hotels need to be considered, the answer has to be yes! Using this calculation basis will help prevent us from saying labour is too high without actually comparing apples to apples.

Let's summarize some benefits of measuring labour effectively:

1. You can tell if your hotel is hitting labour metrics based on your labour plans instead of Occupancy/ADR influences.
2. You can compare properties effectively across your portfolio to identify labour inefficiencies.
3. You can ensure your schedules adhere to your labour plans, creating efficiencies before they even get measured.
4. You can track individual employee performance to see which Team Members need more coaching/training.
5. You can give labour visibility to your leadership team so they have a benchmark to work towards.

That's a lot of you can's! Technology for this functionality has existed for a while, but many of us have not taken the time to implement it.

Remember, if you don't measure it, you won't save it.

As always, thank you for reading.

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