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Five HR trends hoteliers should act on

Digital transformation remains a hot topic in hospitality and continues to dominate the trends in the sector. The pandemic has significantly disrupted operations, resulting in a faster adoption of digital tools and increased demand for mobile-first processes in the hotel workplace. The key HR trends hoteliers should act on are based around these common themes.

  • Embrace digital transformation across the business and for your people
  • Adopt automation into processes and workflows
  • Optimise operational processes and eliminate paper-based processes

1. Leverage digital enablement for staff

As a service driven industry, hotels rely heavily on their people to deliver customer service to guests. Leveraging technology is enabling hotels to rebuild and retain their workforce. Hotel staff work a myriad of shifts and fulfil hundreds of different roles. Digital tools are solving many of the day-to-day operational challenge’s hotels face, such as

  • Staff scheduling
  • Real-time communication across the operation
  • Easy shift swaps
  • Automatically match peak demand
  • Robust compliance for WTD, health and safety and company rules
  • Correct payroll
  • Empowering staff with employee self service
  • Real-time data that drives smarter decisions

This trend for digital enablement embraces secure cloud-based tools that will maximise productivity and build an agile and resilient business.

Now is the perfect time to leverage digital and mobile HR tools in the sector. Over 80% of hotel staff don’t have a company email, but 98% of younger workers in the UK own a smartphone, making mobile connectivity with hotel staff through workplace tech a key HR trend for hoteliers.

2. Agility and resilience

Hotels that adopted digital HR and mobile-first tools which facilitate real-time communication have fared the pandemic far better than those who hadn’t. These are the traits and tools of hotels that have built agility and resilience across the business.

As hotels adjust to new regulations, changing rules and constant change, agility and resilience allows them to anticipate, react and pivot as they need to. Building an operation that is able to recover from disruption, keep people safe and engaged and deliver exceptional service delivers real competitive advantage.

Digital HR software simplifies many of the complexities associated with HR processes, such as recruitment, onboarding, payroll, and staff scheduling. It also helps build resilience and agility.

3. Operational efficiency

Operational efficiency is a perennial goal for most businesses. And the hotel sector is embracing new ways of working in order to cut costs and increase margins. People are a significant cost overhead but essential to the delivery of exceptional customer service for guests. Hotels are looking for creative ways to increase operational efficiency and relieve staff from the burden of inefficient and mundane tasks. For example, housekeeping teams can use digital checklists on their mobile devices instead of paper, staff rotas are on mobile devices to be viewed 24/7. Availability to work and shift request changes can all be done and approved via mobile devices.

According to McKinsey, digitizing HR processes and eliminating paper-based processes can cut costs by up to 90%. Digitization delivers real-time communications across the business which improves staff engagement and responsiveness. It also gives access to real-time data analytics which can be used to plan and predict and adjust as needed.

  • 60% reduction in time spent scheduling your staff
  • 43% reduction in agency spend
  • 25% reduction is staff turnover

All of which deliver greater operational efficiencies and improved margins.

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4. Connecting a dispersed organisation

Hotel workers are widely dispersed around the property, working a variety of shift patterns, often with little personal interaction with HR and operations. As a result, hotels need a way to stay connected to their people, as it can often take over five minutes to find a member of staff.

Hotels need to easily connect their entire workforce, whatever their role, location and function. How do you keep employees connected? The answer is a single, unified hub for information, collaboration, training, rotas, personal information, and communication. This also includes the lighter side of being connected… social.

Digital HR process make this possible, and it means hotels can achieve 100% connectivity across a dispersed workforce.

5. Health and safety

Keeping your people and guests safe is going to remain a priority for hotels for the foreseeable future. And that means a robust approach that can be flexible to changes, often with little notice. Technology will help and guide health and safety strategies in order to build and maintain a safe workplace. Changes to rules and regulations mean that hotels need to implement protocols at speed. Hotels need to construct safety into workplace operations and culture to keep teams engaged and productive without having to worry about their own health and safety at work.

Tools for real-time communication and easy to access information on health and safety, training and FAQ’s streamlines the process and gives staff confidence around health and wellbeing for staff.

HR trends that hoteliers should embrace

Hotels can seize this opportunity to embrace digital transformation as a way of delivering improved performance and a more agile and resilient business. By digitizing time-consuming, inefficient and expensive manual and paper-based processes, hotels and improve margins. This also builds greater security around critical documents which can be accessed securely via mobile devices. Automation of workflows and processes releases staff to focus on guests and customer service, driving up revenue per guest, revenue per room. Digitize, automate and optimise are today’s HR trends for hoteliers.

 

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