Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Why Measure Housekeeping Performance?

By Sam Miller

In order to attract new guests and retain existing ones hotels have to offer high quality services. These days people do not just want to spend a night in a hotel but they want to feel at home. Hospitality of personnel, excellent cuisine, top rated cleaning services and friendly receptionists are something that every guest is looking to find at a hotel. They say that something that can be measured can be improved. This is absolutely true with hotel industry where competition gets really crazy. Indeed, in order to improve performance and make any future plans it is really important to be aware of current performance. Every hotel claiming to be successful needs to have strategic plans and vision. In order to monitor implementation of adopt a strategy the hotel managers and owners need reliable and effective performance evaluation and strategic management tools, just like balanced scorecard which is widely used in various industries.

As already said above, housekeeping and cleaning services are extremely important, especially for five star hotels. Guests want to sleep in clean beds, have shower in clean bathrooms and come back to a clean hotel suit whenever they leave. Housekeeping is perhaps the strongest association with a hotel. Efficiency of housekeeping can be measured in different ways. Evaluation of customer reviews is one of them. However, reviews tell us about something that has already happened or didn't happen, while hotel top managers need information on current housekeeping performance. This is where balanced scorecard comes into play.
As known, balanced scorecard is used to evaluate key performance indicators which are measures representing critical success factors for various aspects of running business. If we're talking about housekeeping we should select the most important KPIs relevant to cleaning and housekeeping services. What key performance indicators are most relevant for housekeeping? In this article we will name a few of them.

Let's take such key performance indicator as number of rooms per one chambermaid. It may happen that one housekeeping assistant is taking care of too many hotel suits which negatively influences quality of cleaning services. If this is the case that human resource department of a particular hotel has to hire more cleaning personnel. Just to the contrary it may turn out that one housekeeping service assistant is regularly cleaning the only several suits and can handle more job.

Laundry services need to be also properly evaluated. Sleeping in dirty bed sheets is definitely a bad idea. It is possible to evaluate such key performance indicators as bed linen change per one stay, guests' requests to change linen etc. Regular vacuuming is important as well and thus needs to be measured. The same concerns all other housekeeping procedures.
Use of balanced scorecard does not only help measure current housekeeping performance but also save costs and rationally use clean personnel, cleansing tools and equipment. Without any doubts, housekeeping services are a part of general hotel services that always need to be improved. By implementing goals in this area housekeeping personnel contributes to implementation of financial goals.

9 comments:

  1. Good Article, I have recently read a article about the formula to calculate housekeeping productivity

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