You can’t clean rooms on Zoom

THE PANDEMIC TAUGHT?people a great deal, particularly that many of them don’t have to go into the office. But it certainly feels as if this new notion has been vastly overblown. For almost two years, we have heard a great deal in the media about how more Americans are working from home than ever before. Granted, more than 31 million American workers are employed in an office-based setting, which means their jobs could translate to a work-from-home scenario. However, that places more than 124 million of the nation’s estimated 156 million total workers on jobsite-type settings. This means an overwhelming majority of them are providing face-to-face customer service, cleaning hotel rooms, providing delivery services, plumbing clogged sinks, or teaching the next generation.

In the hotel industry, we are in the people business, and you can’t clean rooms on Zoom. Without a changing of course, America may learn the hard way that working from home isn’t the wave of the future for the majority of workers. And when employees do work from home, productivity can decrease as many people simply aren’t as efficient and some may take advantage. I’ve been on Zoom calls where a participant is sitting poolside in a chaise lounge.

GET IT DONE

At MCR, we own and operate 125 hotels across 84 cities and 34 states. When fully staffed, our workforce totals about 4,000 team members at Hiltons, Marriotts, and independent hotels. As of this writing, we have 700 open jobs, down from a recent high of 1,300. The labor market has likely never been more difficult and the labor pool never smaller. When hotels closed in the pandemic’s peak, workers in management and line-staff positions got burned. Some didn’t get paid for nearly two years, so they left the industry.

You can draw a line: Largely, people aged 45 and older have remained in the business, as they don’t want to work for Amazon, while many people aged 45 and younger have moved on. Recently, a candidate with 20 years of front desk experience accepted a role as front desk director at one of our New York City hotels. The day before he was due to start, he called to say he’d accepted a finance position at a local Wells Fargo branch.

THE IMMIGRATION SOLUTION

As I see it, there’s an easy solution to this problem by way of immigration reform. Call your Congressional representative and speak out for immigrants and asylum seekers who could add great value to our economy. If every hotelier advocated for immigration reform, we could make a difference.

I went to the University of California, Berkeley, where 41% of undergraduates are the first in their families to go to college. Most of these students are second-generation Americans. Their parents came to the U.S. for the American Dream! With that in mind, we should be opening our doors to those willing to work, especially when the labor market is so challenging. It’s in our collective interest to admit immigrants who want to work, raise a family, and pay taxes in America.

We need team members to service the growing numbers of population. In 1915, the United States population was 100 million. In 1962, it grew to 187 million. By 2003, it was 290 million. Today, it’s 334 million. And those citizens are traveling. In 2003, only 20% of Americans had a passport. But in 2019, 42% had passports and that number is rising at stratospheric rates. People love traveling. Traveling is like breathing and it’s more fun, too.

Read in full in the latest issue of Today's Hotelier Magazine here.