Problems always start at the top
What is the best way to stop the commercial team from maximizing their potential? Are the leader of the company or the hotel general manager the bottleneck? Here are three signs that make the job difficult for the commercial team.
Not delegating
Successful leaders delegate, so why is it challenging for many hoteliers to trust their team and delegate tasks and responsibilities? The old excuse that it is faster to do it yourself is very shortsighted and does not build trust nor develop each individual. Teams do not become energized if their boss does all the fun work and leaves the dirty work to the team members.
Make the time to identify what is holding you back from delegating. Are you afraid of losing visibility and control, or do you need new skills to develop your team? One way of empowering is to increase transparency and give all team members access to the same information about goals, tasks, and performance. People with access to the same dashboards can help drive the company towards goals and budgets. Dashboards update in real-time if the system is modern and well integrated with all data sources.
Collecting all the vast data from all the different systems in the hotel into one system will not only make the job easier for the commercial team but also let the leader have instant access to the hotel's performance. As a result, the leaders can easily delegate tasks and responsibilities, coach their team members, and monitor the results.
Poorly designed or managed processes
Workplace processes in hotels accelerate action, yet an overload of procedures, or broken processes, often hinders progress. For example, a recent survey found that more than 40% of information workers (commercial teams in hotels are in this category) spend at least a quarter of their work week on manual, repetitive tasks, many of which hotels could automate. Another survey showed that workers spend 36% of their workday looking for and consolidating information.
It is probably worse in hotels. Data is stored everywhere in many different systems and certainly not in the same place. Hotels are fantastic at collecting vast amounts of data, but data often ends up sitting idle in stand-alone systems. In hotels, it is business as usual, and many are too busy after several years of the pandemic to even think about how to make the best use of all valuable data to save time, increase productivity, and make better decisions to grow revenue and profits.
Owners, top management, and leaders in hospitality have underinvested in automation to increase productivity. The result is that part of the job is repetitive, boring, and unfulfilling. No wonder hotels have a hard time finding people that want to work in these positions. In addition and worse is that hotels pay qualified and skilled people for doing work that hotels should have automated a long time ago — what a waste of money.
To pull the hotel out of this cycle, the leaders must take action and evaluate everyday processes. The easiest way is to ask the team members which tasks they want to eliminate. It will likely be the repetitive mundane tasks that are the easiest to automate. Team members cannot stop doing part of their jobs, so the analysis of the processes followed by decisions about investing in improving processes is the responsibility of the owner, top management, or the leader - not the employee.
Another way to spot processes needing improvement is to look at what work requires top-down approvals. For example, hotels need to move quickly to stay competitive, so poorly designed processes that slow down the decision-making is a direct cost in terms of time and lost opportunities.
Unclear goals and expectations
The final problem to solve is communication. Even if the leaders delegate appropriately and streamline processes, they continue to hinder productivity when they do not communicate goals and expectations to the team. By clarifying goals and expectations, leaders empower their employees to act autonomously.
Set a few overall goals and communicate these to all team members in the hotel. Then discuss and define how the commercial team contributes to these general goals. Once the team understands and agrees on measuring their contribution, the work towards the goals can start. Easy to access dashboards automatically keep track of the progress so team members can focus on taking action instead of wasting time manually collecting and processing data.
Focus and align the team by keeping the KPIs to a minimum (maximum five per team). Conflicting goals and KPIs should be a problem of the past when commercial roles worked in silos.
Let the team make the hotel a success
Many leaders in hospitality do not even realize that with the right mindset and tools, they can easily remove roadblocks and pave the way to success for the hotel. When hotels recover from several problematic years, it is the perfect time to take small steps in clarifying and delegating responsibilities, re-think and automating mundane processes, and set and communicating goals.
Demand Calendar makes it easy for leaders
Demand Calendar collects data from many different sources in one place where information is easily accessible for leaders and commercial teams. In addition, access to performance dashboards makes it easy to delegate tasks and responsibilities.
Demand Calendar has carefully updated the traditional hotel work processes to improve productivity but within the same familiar way of working. The key is automating the mundane and repetitive tasks of collecting and managing data to focus the human knowledge and skills where they are needed the most.
Finally, hotel leaders can set goals, track the progress, and follow up on the performance of their teams in real-time dashboards in Demand Calendar.
