Hospitality trend in 2022: Tech for your people
To run a successful hospitality business, you have to treat employees just as well as your guests because it’s your people that make hotel stays exceptional, not properties.
The pressure and stress on your team is only increasing while the industry is riding out a labor crisis, pandemic travel waves and erratic supply chain issues.
The best thing hotel groups can do for employees is remove the speed bumps. By leveraging a variety of technologies, leaders can improve processes, streamline operations and minimize the hardest parts of work for both front-line and back-office employees.
New tools of the trade
Integrating digital collaboration tools with your operations can keep your teams connected with each other and give them access to information on-demand.
Key information like phone lists and checklists can be migrated into programs, like Microsoft Teams, rather than being get buried in binders and paper files. Because Teams was designed for mobile, frontline workers can stay connected to the information – and to each other – throughout the day with instant messaging, phone calls, video chats and email.
Mobile tools can help:
- Communicate urgent issues, as well as best practices and company announcements
- Recognize team members and share results
- Track daily activities and gather key metrics about workloads and service times
- Enable peer-to-peer sharing, training and collaboration
Communicate, collaborate and share
Just connecting offline teams has a huge impact on efficiency and job satisfaction. For example, housekeeping can snap a photo of a maintenance need and share it with the engineering department. And location-sharing tools help everyone find and resolve issues faster. Staff aren’t wandering around the property looking for problems – or waiting until they see someone to say something.
Housekeepers, desk clerks and food and beverage staff can stay connected to the rest of the company, even while they’re on the floor. Instead of posting information to bulletin boards, relevant information is delivered to them directly.
Teams enables faster communications than paper-based processes and staff can join multiple Teams groups based on their job role, property or training needs.
In addition, data like satisfaction scores and guest feedback can be shared daily and with all team members so they can see how decisions affected guest satisfaction. Conversations about best practices can occur across a single or multiple properties and even globally. For example, maintenance staff can troubleshoot an issue with team members at different facility. Or trainers can be accessible to any location or shift.
Apps can also make processes more efficient. For example, instead of working up schedules in a spreadsheet and then posting them to a bulletin board, everything can be managed in a scheduling app. The process is easier and faster for managers, and employees can see and monitor their schedules. They can even swap shifts in an app, when needed.
How Wipfli can help
At Wipfli, we believe perspective changes everything. That’s why our teams craft unique solutions driven by their combined knowledge from deep hospitality and technology experience. We go beyond the programs to ensure your people and processes are a part of the solution. Contact us to learn more or see our hospitality services web page.
About our series
In this series, Wipfli explores four technology trends that are shaping the hospitality industry in 2022 so leaders can:
- Prevent cyberattacks with a safe and efficient infrastructure
- Elevate the guest experience with the right software
- Reduce labor crunch with redesigned processes and communication tools
- Increase guest engagement with loyalty apps
Read part one: Cybersecurity must-haves
Read part two: Customer vs. property management tools
