Talent Retention: Is it a problem we brought on ourselves?

The hospitality industry remained resilient the past five years amidst labor challenges, including finding and retaining qualified talent. Sure, good talent can be difficult to find, but is this more of a problem we brought on ourselves?

To answer this question, we must first evaluate the current state. Are you promoting from within? Are you losing good talent to competitors? Or are people simply leaving the industry?

While each of these factors could play a role, the reality is that today’s above-property revenue managers are pulled in multiple directions. They're managing more properties than before but operating with the same working hours and the tools from decades ago. By elevating the expectations but not the employee experience, revenue managers across the globe are experiencing burnout.

Think about it, take a single property Director of Revenue Management (DORM) makes more than 100,000 pricing and inventory decisions each year. Then, add ten more properties as an above-property DORM, and that could lead to over a million decisions for just one person. Sticking to the status-quo of the hotel by hotel, day by day, and rate by rate mindset leaves above-property DORMS drowning in data and exhaustingly running on the hamster wheel of manual tasks.

To solve the talent retention problem, leaders could look down three paths: more people, process improvement, or scalable technology. Let’s explore these proposed solutions and imagine each change within your organization.

• More people: This is the most intuitive answer but is it the right one? Hiring more and more people to combat the high turnover could work in the short-term, but the doom loop continues to spiral in the long-term as those newer employees experience burnout like the others before.
• Process Improvement: Rethinking your current workflow and agenda during strategy meetings can never hurt. Instead of inquiring about manual override decisions, you can reshape your questions to be more high-level, results-driven, and strategic. This could save some prep time by not having to pull the data behind every single pricing decision in the past 90 days.
• Scalable Technology: The right tech should scale cost effectively across people and process. What does this look like? Your people can use the tool without getting stuck in analysis paralysis. The process for changing rates and inventory is intuitive by prioritizing the big decisions and automating the miniscule ones. Your people are freed from manual tasks and can allocate more time to strategy and cross-functional alignment.

No matter which paths you choose, the goal remains the same – bring talented individuals to your team and keep them happy.  Adding people and improving processes will take you so far, but N2Pricing™ RMS  can help you live the dream. To learn more about N2Pricing, schedule some time with an expert from our team.