Your staff are the lifeblood of your organization. Whether you run a hotel, a guesthouse, or any other type of hospitality-based institution, your success directly depends on the performance of your staff.
As such, ensuring that the staff are well-motivated, loyal, and armed with what they need to do their best is in your best interest.
There are many things you could do to motivate your staff. They can involve changes you can bring from within the organization and things you can do outside the organization.
Let’s take a look at 5 ways you can motivate your staff to bring the best out of them.
1. Provide Job Security
The COVID-19 pandemic hit the hospitality industry very hard. With global travel halted, the hospitality industry came to a standstill. This led to thousands of people losing their jobs from resorts, hotels, etc. and being forced to face the global lockdown in dire financial straits.
While most of the companies that took part in COVID-downsizing did it to protect their businesses and stay afloat, the result ended up being the loss of scores of highly trained and specialized staff. It also led to immense struggles for the former staff and fostered resentment towards the industry, which might prevent these skilled workers from returning.
What these companies failed to understand is that by providing job security to their staff despite the financial loss in the short term, they stood to gain more profits long term.
Protecting your staffs’ jobs during crisis situations fosters loyalty that goes beyond platitudes and annual staff parties. It shows your staff that you care about their lives and their well-being. It lets them know that you are worth investing their time, effort, and faith in.
Such employees are more likely to be loyal and stick by you when times are tough on your end as well.
2. Respect your Staff
This one might seem simple at first, but does require a bit of effort to pull off to any meaningful degree. It is not simply a matter of speaking politely to them. It also involves respecting their needs, their grievances, and their dignity. Let us elaborate.
For example, with policies such as maternity and paternity leave, you can both respect your staffs’ right to start a family and support them during some of the most important days of their lives. Knowing that their company respects them in this way makes them more likely to return to the job after their leave ends.
Another important part of respecting employees is being open to hear their grievances. Sometimes when things don’t go according to plan, it is the employees who are at fault. However, there are times when confusing practices, miscommunication, poor utilization of resources, and other managerial issues become a hindrance to your staff’s work. No one is perfect, not even managers.
As such, having an avenue by which your staff can air out their grievances and you can discuss a feasible solution could go a long way towards fostering trust between the decision-making part of your organization and the staff that work to bring these decisions to life.
Another often overlooked issue is how managements tend not to protect their staff in the face of problem customers. Not every customer who visits will be polite or easy to deal with. Some can be very entitled, rude, or disrespectful. Your staff will always take the brunt of this abuse.
As such, listening to your staff’s version of what happened before making judgments is very important. It shows them that you care about what happens to them as they do what you asked them to do.
Staff who feel respected and heard are more motivated to do better work.
3. Offer Rewards and Incentives
This is probably the most common advice among the tips offered in this article. You’d often see offering rewards, bonuses, and incentives as a sort of managerial “cheat code” to foster happy employees, but it doesn’t quite work like that.
Firstly, offering rewards without paying attention to the first two tips offered here will result in your staff seeing your incentives as hollow and false. Aside from the most loyal, most staff wouldn’t see these bonuses as worth striving for.
However, if you respect them and take care of them, these rewards and incentives are more attractive. When their basic needs are taken care of and their lives get some form of stability, they are more likely to spend on luxuries. This means they need to earn more, which is where your rewards/incentives come in.
Another point to consider is that when setting rewards and incentives, you should consider making it so that there is more than one winner. Pitting your staff against one another will contribute to a hostile work environment and lower their overall performance.
As such, try to budget and plan these incentives in such a way that many people can attain it, provided they put in the extra work needed.
4. Share Positive Feedback
It might surprise you to learn that sharing positive feedback with staff is still not a very common practice. In fact, the executive or management level of companies rarely give feedback to their staff, unless it is negative or there is a crisis going on.
Changing this archaic way of doing things costs virtually nothing and can create a more positive work environment. It shows your staff that you value and celebrate their hard work and encourages them to keep it up.
Often, work in the hospitality industry can be quite repetitive and tedious. When you’ve cleaned your 50th room, the task becomes mundane. Therefore, acknowledging a staff’s hard work can make them feel like the countless hours they spend doing these tasks are being recognized.
The real importance of providing positive feedback is to ensure that your staff feel a sense of fulfilment from their work. If you can inspire that in your staff, you will have loyal staff that would go above and beyond the call of duty to give you and your guests their very best.
5. Invest in the Right Tools
There is an old saying that goes, “you need to spend money to make money”. If this is true, the question becomes, “what do you need to spend money on?”
The quick and easy answer is a bit vague; the right tools to help your staff do their jobs. Let’s elaborate on this a little and dive a little deeper.
When we say “tools”, we aren’t simply talking about gadgets or technology. We are also talking about training.
Providing adequate training and orientation to your staff regarding their position in your company and the unique ways you do things can be incredibly beneficial in the long run. Not only do you have a fully competent staff ready to go when they start work, but you also ensure that the staff doesn’t feel intimidated or overwhelmed. These things can negatively affect performance.
That being said, it is also a good idea to invest in digital solutions to some of the issues your staff face. Keeping track of requests, managing guest itineraries, and locating guests are all things that can be made simpler through digital tools.
As such, looking into the needs of your staff and connecting them to the right digital tools can be a massive boon to them and increase their motivation to do better.
Your staff ensures your continued survival in the hospitality industry. As such, it is important to take care of your staff and make sure that they are properly motivated to do the best job they can.
Those were our top five ways to motivate our staff. You’ll notice that there is a lot of focus placed on the human behind the nametag. This is because COVID-19 has shown us that agitated staff can be a massive liability to any company. Plus, it is definitely the more ethical and humane way forward as well.
We hope you found these tips useful. Especially number 5.
Speaking of number 5, we invite you to check out our easy-to-use, easy-to-learn, highly customizable digital concierge app, TripKit.
Head on over to our website and see what TripKit can do for your staff, your hotel, and you.