“It’s not always that we need to do more but rather that we need to focus on less.” — Nathan W. Morris
In hospitality, the measurement and management of productivity is hit and miss and miss again. Time and time again hotels are using ineffective measures to try and capture labor productivity measurements.
It is important from the beginning to establish the goals for measuring productivity in your operations. This article will focus on rooms and Part 2 will be F&B.
The goal in measuring productivity in the rooms division is to see, monitor and ultimately improve on the number of hours of work it takes to service a room. The expression to use is “hours per room occupied.”
Hours worked divided by the number of rooms sold. This labor productivity statistic is the most important tool available to manage your biggest expense in the rooms division.
If you were making cars, you would want to know and continually improve on how many hours and minutes of labor it takes to make a car. Regarding rooms, labor comes down to how many hours it takes to service one room. You want to see this at the total rooms level as well as how it stacks up.
The “rooms stack” is best laid out with the following sub totals: front office, housekeeping, room attendants, reservations and bell/door. These categories must be separate to see where there are productivity wins and challenges. To be able to see labor categories separately, use proper departments and job codes to fall into the different stacks. In addition to the separation of the stacks, you need to know the difference between hourly and management positions in each stack.
To do this effectively and consistently there must be a payroll dictionary. Establishing a consistent way to segregate labor is not difficult. Start by defining the difference between management and hourly positions. For consistency, ignore salaried vs. hourly and union vs. nonunion. These are ignored because they differ greatly from location to location. Instead focus on job title. The word manager is critical. If the word manager or higher appears in the title, they fall into the management category. If supervisor or a lower title appears in the job title, they fall into the hourly category. Here is an example for “front office.” It is important to recognize that management or hourly terminology is only a way to organize data and is not an indication of any regard.
