How to Increase Hotel Employee Engagement
A Checklist for Engaging Hourly Hotel Employees During Peak Season
Summer is finally here, and for the hospitality industry, the time is now to bring your A-game for the peak travel season.
The U.S. leisure travel market continues to see robust annual growth, representing hundreds of billions in revenue. On the corporate side, a vast majority of travel managers consistently anticipate an uptick in business trips. Accommodating this influx of customers inevitably entails recruiting more full-time and seasonal hourly employees.
Mass seasonal hiring can come with a number of pain points around onboarding, training, and scheduling. However, with the right employee engagement strategy and solution in place, hotels can overcome the challenges that seasonal staffing and service bring.
Your Frontline: The Built-In Brand Ambassadors
Frontline employees, even those who only work three months out of the year, are a hotel’s built-in brand ambassadors. They’re the first people to hear from a dissatisfied customer, and often the first to detect issues in a hotel’s day-to-day operations. Investing in tools and processes that keep hourly employees motivated is a direct investment in your customer service—and your profitability. The right hospitality engagement platform makes it easier to offer what hourly workers need to be truly engaged.
1. Collaborative Scheduling
Under- and over-staffing are expensive problems year-round, but they can have an outsized impact on revenue and employee morale during the hectic summer rush. Unlike manual scheduling methods, the right digital tool makes shift management a two-way street, resulting in more balanced staffing for managers and employees. An employee engagement app can help hotel managers capture workers’ preferred shifts and availability. This information reduces absenteeism and no-shows. Managers can also broadcast open shifts, giving employees the autonomy to volunteer for hours that match their needs.
2. Agile Training
Hiring seasonal employees doesn’t mean offering abbreviated training; it means hotels need to get those workers up to speed faster to deliver top-quality service. Traditional training methods like in-person shadowing and manual instruction are time-consuming. Shifting materials onto a digital learning platform minimizes the burden on supervisors, giving employees the opportunity to learn at their own pace from any device. What once took up pages in a binder can become a series of short videos and interactive quizzes—formats that improve knowledge retention and can be “gamified” to incentivize ongoing learning.
3. Meaningful Rewards and Recognition
During a frenzied season, it’s easy for year-round employees to feel burned out, and for seasonal staff to lose motivation. An engagement platform gives managers the ability to tie tangible rewards and recognition (e.g., digital badges, points, and physical merchandise) to specific performance metrics like customer service wins or upselling. Rewards demonstrate appreciation and can be exchanged for benefits like the first pick of open shifts. For seasonal workers, these rewards become a transferable record of skills that can set them up for long-term careers in the industry.
For the hotel industry, a busy season is a good business problem to have. With the right employee engagement strategy in place, hotel leaders can ensure all employees are prepared for a productive season by making them an active part of day-to-day decision-making and long-term wins.
