I know this sounds harsh, but if we go by the definition of insanity as ‘Repeating the same thing over again and expecting a different result’, it may ring true to even the most sceptical readers.
Yet, if you speak to a truly experienced executive housekeeper from the ‘old guard’, one that has been around for longer than 15 years, you’ll find that not much has changed in housekeeping. While technology has infiltrated all other aspects of a hotel’s operations, housekeeping appears to be the crocodile of the hotel world, the one that just seems to have been bypassed by evolution.
If you work in (or with) housekeeping, you’re probably familiar with the daily routine: A supervisor arrives early in the morning and spends the better part of 2 hours to allocate the daily cleaning jobs between room attendants and balance the workload in the PMS. After that, it’s down to highlighting and scribbling on the individual task sheets. Room attendants then arrive and start cleaning the rooms in a sequence that is mostly up to the individual (and not always the one that a manager prefers to get clean rooms back early). After that, the speed of communicating changes and updates occurs at a speed directly proportional to the supervisor’s fitness levels and elevator availability. Now – this is only a very high-level overview and I probably do not need to elaborate further because you, as a hotel professional, know exactly what I mean.
But: Do not forget that this operation, which at the end of the day looks after the core product of the hotel, works in an environment of transient and often unskilled labour, hence loose ends are rarely picked up and corrected by alert staff. Efficiency and its impact upon costs, quality and guest satisfaction are firmly in the hands of individual middle managers that have not been equipped with tools deserving of the monumental task they have to perform each day.
So, going back to my opening statement: Is housekeeping a the edge of insanity? For generations, hotels have finetuned their procedures with new managers arriving, improving things minutely at a surface level. The underlying issues though have never been addressed with any depth. Oops – I nearly forgot to mention that walkie-talkies and pagers were introduced roughly 15 years ago. Oops again – some PMS systems were successful in translating our traditional, ineffective approaches onto a computer system and 3rd party vendors added modules that tangentially improve the situation. None of those addressed underlying processes to make a noticable difference though, so therefore yes – housekeeping departments worldwide are still doing the same thing in a different way and ARE expecting it to make a difference. That’s insane.
Now that I have somewhat set the scene, and I will elaborate further on this over the next weeks, let me refer you to www.optiisolutions.com. A new approach for the 21st century is on its way!