As the pandemic continues to evolve and the labor crisis forces hoteliers to find new solutions to do more with fewer workers, workforce management technology is assisting with tasks like labor planning, workflow management and payroll. A recent webinar sponsored by workforce management platform UniFocus and presented by Questex, parent company of Hotel Management, discussed how different technologies can make running a hotel easier.
While the labor situation was a challenge before COVID struck, Pat Volz, president and COO of Blackstone Real Estate Hotels and Resorts, said that the pandemic made the problem worse. “It doesn't matter who you are; you [have] about 10 to 12 percent open positions still out there,” he said. The decline is especially notable in the housekeeping and culinary teams, he added, with some hotels unable to open their restaurants for certain meal periods because they don’t have the necessary labor to do so. “We have luxury hotels where the brand standards are a full clean every night. We just can't do it. We're doing quick cleans.”
The industry, Volz said, is at its highest use of contract labor in his 30 years in the field. Matthew Taylor, director, workforce performance, operations finance, Americas at Hilton, agreed, and noted that each team member is taking on more roles than before. “We've never seen these many front-office managers have to be behind the desks, these many food-and-beverage managers have to be in the outlets taking orders [and] running food as opposed to the actual servers who are typically doing those jobs,” he said. “And that means our managers just don't have the oversight that they used to. They're too involved in the operation itself.”
Solutions
Taylor said technologies for reporting, scheduling and communicating with team members are some of the biggest factors in helping managers “get out from behind the desk” where they otherwise might spend time scheduling workers or checking guests in.
Technology companies are regularly releasing new devices, programs and platforms to help hoteliers streamline their tasks. Handheld devices in restaurants, for example, can send a guest’s order to the kitchen and charge the credit card whenever the guest is ready for the bill, Volz noted. “That makes your server more efficient out on the floor from a revenue standpoint, but they can also cover more tables,” he said. In other parts of a hotel, building automation systems and wireless smart thermostat controls helps cut down room calls from engineers. New platforms also allow guests to tip any hotel team member digitally rather than looking for cash.
Not all of the technology solutions have to be complex programs or new gadgets. Volz noted that an LED light bulb will burn for 60,000 hours while an incandescent light bulb burns for 3,000 hours. In a large resort with thousands of bulbs burning 24 hours per day, engineers might have to regularly change incandescent bulbs—but by switching to LEDs, not only does the hotel reduce its energy usage, it can operate with fewer maintenance workers and engineers. “The payback on LEDs is in 12 months just on energy savings, let alone labor,” he said.
Volz noted that the millennial workforce is looking for “maximum flexibility” in their schedules, and Taylor said technology can help achieve that goal. “We've got to think a lot more dynamically about how we roster our team members and how we can change our shift structure in our hotels to be able to accommodate those people that now don't want full eight-hour days,” he said. “How can we change our approach to scheduling—and most importantly, our reporting capabilities—around that to accommodate these team members?”
But Taylor also pointed out that while data can help an algorithm help a hotelier, that data needs to be accurate. “if you put in something that's just not going to be right, whatever you get out of it's not going to be right, either,” he said. “So whenever [you’re] thinking about implementing any kind of labor management system, I think the first thing that needs to be considered is what kind of information you're going to be providing to that system in order to be able to get the most out of it.”
Watch "How Technology is Revolutionizing Hotel Operations and Labor Management" online here.