Whether your hotel is a large one or a small one, administrative work is the piece that takes up most of your time and the time of your employees. Administrative work does not result in profit for your company. Despite this, it plays a vital role in company operations. Due to human error, administrative work will sometimes need to be redone, taking more of your employee’s time. On average, employees spend about 60% of their time completing administrative work and 13% of their time conducting planning and analysis. Meaning about 27% of their time is available to your employees to complete the tasks they were hired for. Working people everywhere are not able to work as effectively as possible. When this happens, deadlines lengthen. Luckily, there are ways to optimize operations at your hotel and leave more time for your employees to work on the tasks they were hired for.
Have a clear system
If your administrative process is confusing, your employees spend more time completing this work. This is not an efficient use of their time. To best optimize operations at your hotel, ensure that your administrative steps make sense. You should explain these steps clearly and concisely. This should help, but will not eliminate, the human error variable. People are imperfect and therefore bound to make mistakes. While your employees must make efforts to reduce these mistakes, they happen. Having a simple administrative system in place will help to minimize these mistakes. One way to simplify this process is to use one central platform where your work takes place. It would be best if you also made this system have as few steps as possible. Freeing up your employees’ time will go a long way in optimizing your hotel’s operations.
Administrative teams
Make sure you have a team working on all administrative tasks. Put this together in whichever way makes sense for your hotel. Maybe this means organizing your team to work one at a time in shifts or a team working all at once. If only one person works on administrative work, they may drown in it. Organizing teams will allow you to optimize your hotel operations. This is because your team will be able to get through the work at a faster rate. It should also help to keep the morale of your administrative team up as they will feel less overwhelmed. Try outsourcing if you do not have the staff to create this team. There are many companies which you can outsource employees from. If even this solution is not viable for you at this time, hire virtual assistants. Since Covid-19, dedicated websites for hiring virtual assistants have emerged. You can take the time to find someone or a few people who have backgrounds in what you are looking for. Additionally, it is more cost-effective to hire virtual assistants. This is because they work remotely, perhaps based on an hourly wage.
Automate the process
There are many areas of administrative work that can be automated. The most convenient tasks of administrative work to automate are general FAQs from incoming guests and scheduling automated responses. Computerized answers can also go out when sending confirmation emails to guests or asking for additional information. While the entire process cannot be automated, it can be further optimized by ensuring you are using effective computer programs. Using the right computer programs, administrative work can be sped up. Programs like Guesty help your employees work across multiple channels on one platform and view schedules simultaneously. Another activity that could be automated is the check-in process. Installing kiosks that can do the check-in process for you will reduce lines and waiting times and free up your employees.
Don’t only optimize admin work
You can optimize other areas besides administration work in your hotel’s operations. For example, these employees can be outsourced if you have staff shortages on your housekeeping team. If you need to allocate more staff to administration work and allow them to be more hands-off, install Alertify. Alertify is a small, plug-in room monitoring device that helps you get ahead of customer complaints. This can be immensely helpful to your hotel’s operations for many reasons. Firstly, you will minimize administrative work because you will have fewer complaints to respond to urgently. Secondly, you will reduce noise complaints, the most frequent complaint hotels receive. Alertify monitors noise, smoke, occupancy, and temperature levels on a room-by-room basis. Hoteliers will receive customizable notifications if any of these activities have occurred so they may address them promptly. Hoteliers also have access to an online portal to see every listed action that happened and for how long. Alertify draws low power, so it will not vastly increase the energy used by your hotel. The device allows your hoteliers to be more hands-off while still keeping an eye on current guests while respecting their privacy. Optimize your hotel’s operations today with Alertify.
