Time Management in Hotel Front Office.

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Time management-

Peak performance, cost effectiveness, overtime, shifts, duty roasters, staff allocation, and crisis management, Effects of inter and intra departmental communication and co-ordination on performance.

Peak Performance: The ability to do one?s best, in one?s best physical state.

Peak Performance occurs when activities are done to ensure that goals are consistently being met in an effective and efficient manner. Peak Performance can focus on ensuring consistent performance of the organization, a department, processes to build a product or service, employees, etc.

Peak Performance in the current scenario:

The Indian hospitality industry's rapid growth is being derailed owing to high attrition and fickle loyalty of its most important resource -people. Today the hotel appears to be a punishing environment, it demands exceptional performance from employees, while promising great rewards, career opportunities and job enrichment. The skill sets required by an employee have evolved over the years, transforming their linear roles to multi-functional operations.

Ensuring Peak Performance

? Motivational Techniques like performance appraisals, rewards, incentives, perks, benefits.

? Good working environment, supportive colleagues, encouraging & understanding supervisors

? Delegating challenges & new tasks.

? Participation in events, contests etc.

? Training to develop the right skills needed.

Financial Incentives:

? Increasing motivation through financial rewards is a method that is most common when businesses rely on the quantity of the output of employees. In front office incentives are given to those who manage to rise above the expected monthly revenue.

? Introducing fringe benefits instead of increasing wages or salaries such as company cars, private health, or interest-free loans from the business.

Non Financial Incentives:

? Money may not be an effective motivator, although it may have some effect in the short term: employees may also see factors aside from money as prime motivators.

? Motivation may be increased by giving employees more responsibility so that they feel their contribution is more valuable to the business and that their role is of higher importance. They also may be promised that the chance of promotion exists if they reach a certain standard or target.

Job Enlargement:

This involves expanding the job of an employee that has them doing more work of a similar nature to what they already do. This may be allowing them to complete the whole task instead of just part of it, for example, taking guest reservation as well as processing room charges. This process ideally removes the boredom out of the job by eliminating the repetitiveness out of tasks and allowing them to complete the whole process, further increasing their responsibility.

Job Rotation

This involves allowing employees to change the nature of their job periodically. In front office, a front desk assistant can be rotated into departments like Bell Desk, Reservation, Cashier, Telephone etc

The purpose of this is that the employee, again, is satisfied by reduced boredom and also motivated by the achievement of increased skills.

Job Enrichment

Similar to job enlargement, you can enrich an employee?s job by expanding their tasks to give a higher level of responsibility in the nature of work they do.

For example The Task list can be expanded to include tasks like promoting the hotel?s restaurants through guest interaction, upselling, handling guest complaints etc

Training

? Hotels have management training programmes, such as Taj?s IHCL, EIH of Oberoi, and The Park, which serves as an apt training ground. Once an individual has entered the system, they are given an induction and subsequently trained, a stepping-stone to ensure peak performance. Perhaps one factor which requires utmost attention initially is training an employee to understand the corporate philosophy and culture of a property and brand, says Andrew Mensforth, general manager, Park Hyatt Goa, without which an employee can never completely integrate himself as a part of the other associates, and be completely in and comfortable sync with the hotel's unique service style.

? Developing the synergy between appraisals and training helps in retaining right people at right place on right time

Numbers and Hours:

How many Front Office Executives are needed? One Executive should be able to handle 50-60 occupies rooms. If he/she was also was taking care of cashiering then the ratio would have reduced. This depends upon:

? The occupancy rate

? Average length of stay: long stayers lesser burden

? The pattern of activity: Departure and Arrivals peaks could mostly be in early morning and afternoons. Airport hotels may have more even distribution of arrival departure patterns.

? The amount of personal Contact required: This could be reduced by preregistering groups, taking care of Groups by Group Organisers, Automated check-in, check-out. FITs may welcome these innovations but others may still want the personal touch.

? The character of Hotel: A few minutes wait may be ok in smaller town leisure hotel, but not in busy city centre environment.

? The technology being employed: manual methods more expensive because of clerical work.

Activity patterns of the main front office areas:

1. Booking requests for a large international hotel may come in at any time of the day or night, but mainly during normal business hours.

2. The telephone operators will also be busiest during business hours.

3. The desk should be staffed throughout the 24 hour period but least during the night shift. The main peaks will come during the check-outs (7.30 -10.30 am) and arrivals (1.00 to 7.00 pm)

4. The control process should go on all the time, but the natural time for general review is the middle of the night. Known as Night Audit.

This activity pattern calls for a series of shifts. With a normal working day of 8 hours, the 24 hour period can be divided into three consecutive and overlapping shifts namely:

? Morning Shift starting between 6.30 to 7.30 hrs.

? Afternoon shift from 14.30 to 15.30 hrs.

? A night shift (graveyard shift) from 22.00 to 23.00 hrs.

Sometimes a general shift from 9 am to 6 pm is also given to few employees which is the normal business hours. Employees in this shift are able to attend to many back office activities during this period. It may be more suitable for older, experienced person with a family, or could be introduced as a part of the rota scheme to allow staff a ?normal day? at regular intervals.

Duty Roaster and Staff allocation:

Arranging staff rotas is one of the most challenging duties of the front office manager. Following considerations need to be made for this:

? Holiday entitlements

? Advance preparation of rota

? Right mix of youth and experienced staff

? Occupancy forecasts need to studied before preparation of a rota.

Overtime

Minimum work hours are 9 hrs as per factories act 1948. An employee working more than 9 hours is eligible for payment as over time or compensatory off as per company policies. (Implemented in hotel industry from 2009 onwards).

Crisis Management:

Crisis Front Office Management should develop property specific procedures for responding to emergencies such as fires, natural calamities, medical emergencies, crimes, terrorist activities, threat or attack. Regular review of Crisis Management must be done by Management. Front Office staff who react quickly and efficiently to an emergency situation may help in preventing the damage.

Interdepartmental Communication

Pivotal role in delivering quality service.

The Front Office communicates guests? requirements to other departments which work in close coordination and cooperation to deliver required products and services. Communication of Front Office with following departments is maintained for desired service standards:

Housekeeping:

The FO and Hk department communicate with each other for the following information:

Room Status: Both these departments must coordinate on the room status report. Hk department prepares an occupancy report which is sent to the front office department where it is tallied with room status records. This helps to:

? Update room status

? Find Sleepers (a room from which the guest has checked out but is showing as an occupied in front office status records).

? Know the exact house count

? Coordinate in guest room change.

Security concerns: Housekeeping personnel must inform the front office in case of any suspicious activity.

Special Arrangements: Guests request for additional or special amenities during their stay like extra blanket, soap, shampoo, iron to the front desk which must be conveyed at the earliest to the hk department. For special guests extra amenities? request like flower arrangement, bath robe etc must be conveyed by the reservations or front desk to housekeeping. Special arrangements for VIPs, groups and crews also need to be conveyed to housekeeping.

Food and Beverage Department:

The Front Office department informs the F & B department about the arrival departure of guests, which helps them to plan their work schedule and staff requirement. It also informs F & B about special food arrangements and parties. The Front Desk sends information about:

? The arrival and departure of guests

? Setting up bars in VIP rooms

? Special arrangements lile cookies, fruit basket, and assorted dry fruits.

? In-house and expected VIPs, and corporate guests.

? In house and expected groups

? In house and expected crews

? The scanty baggage in house guests; all points of sales are notified to receive all payment in cash from these guests.

? Groups and guests with bookings of specific meal plans.

Sales and Marketing Department:

Front Office department coordinates with S & M for the following information:

? Guest histories

? Room reservations records

? Current room availability status

? Group, corporate and crew bookings

? Setting the transient and bulk room sales.

Front Office must keep information on room availability status and guest histories accurate and updated. This helps S & M dept. to make packages to sell in the future period.

Engineering and Maintenance:

Front Office communicated with E & M dept. for proper upkeep of systems and equipments installed in the department. Front Office also informs E & M of any repair work in an occupied guest room, they also work put a schedule so that the maintenance work is carried out in the absence of the guest in the room. Such complains are logged in repair work orders? book. A request from the guest regarding maintenance is always followed up by the Front Office staff and time of completion is also noted.

Security:

The Front Desk is a link between guests and other departments of the hotel. When a guest has security concerns like fire, robbery, theft, or any other emergency, the front desk should explain the emergency procedure to the guest while calling on security personnel to resolve the problem.

Finance Controller

The front desk provides a daily summary of the financial transactions after night auditing to the finance controller. The information provided by the front desk helps the finance controller to make the budget and allocate resources to the current financial year. Financial data for billing and maintenance of credit card ledgers is given by front desk. High balance report etc help F. controller to formulate policies and strategies to recover the money from the guest and companies.

Human Resource

For growth and development of front office employees, a close coordination between the two departments is necessary. The front office informs HR about the requirement of new staff, training requirement for the new staff, fresher training for the existing ones, and cross training requirements. The Front IOffice prepares the guidelines for the selection of its employees.

Banquets:

Front Office coordinates with the banquets for putting information and placing directional signals for various functions happening at the hotel. The Banquets department sends the function prospectus to the front office so that in case any communication is received by the FO of the hosting parties, it may be sent to the Banquets.

Thus besides communicating with guests, the front office also communicates with internal customers who are the other departments of the hotel.