Are concerns around workforce talent, employee retention, and turnover keeping you up at night? If so, you’re in good company. Our team had the good fortune to sit down with a group Chief Revenue Officer’s (CROs) to discuss various hospitality topics – the good, the bad, and the ugly – and this idea of employee talent and retention was top of mind for many.
In this blog, we’ll dive into the struggle many hospitality leaders are facing when it comes to their workforce and offer a potentially surprising solution: technology.
The CROs we spoke to all support a unique portfolio of hotels, but the issues they are facing are remarkably similar. Common themes included:
Hiring good people is hard. Keeping them happy is hard. Training and developing new employees is hard.
But what if, with the right systems in place, we could make it just a little bit easier?
Our team posed this question to the group: What if you could give your team 50 hours back each month? How would they react? How would you want them to use the time?
After a few laughs and “that-will-never-happen” eye rolls, the group offered up some really insightful answers.
All of these are worthwhile pursuits, and an obvious upside to having more time back. But the answer that really struck us was this: “Better work-life balance – which we all joke about, and say we should have, but then we get burnt out – that’s what I want for my team. To use those 50 hours for themselves.” This seasoned CRO truly believes that giving their team time back to actually pursue work-life balance – whatever that looks like for them – is the key to unlocking happy, productive employees who will stick around.
Now you may be thinking: 50 hours a month back? How? It seems too good to be true. But it doesn’t have to be.
The secret to unlocking this extra time? The right technology. Your team is short on time because they are buried in repetitive, manual tasks. They’re struggling to use complicated systems that don’t talk to one another. RMs are too busy trying to figure out the price at one hotel for next Tuesday to be able to step back and see the bigger picture.
But with modern technology that is intuitive, automated, and built for the way RMs actually work today, all of that can change. The right technology can unlock their time, allowing them to pursue the things that make them better, happier, more well-rounded employees.
So now for the final hurdle: how do you get them to actually use the technology you’ve invested in? There’s a long history of RMs and General Managers lacking confidence in or feeling that they know better than the system, and either not using it or constantly overriding it. This perpetuates the cycle of employees stuck in an endless loop of manual tasks, increasing the likelihood of burnout.
The key to getting them to embrace the systems you have in place is instilling confidence that they can trust those systems. So how do we get there?
Take our N2Pricing™ RMS. N2 is built on a foundation of powerful analytics & transparency, it is designed to support the modern above-property revenue manager. RMs can feel confident in the price recommendations produced because they can see exactly how and why the recommendations were produced. Instead of burying users in data, a few key points are highlighted, providing RMs with the context they need to accept price recommendations and tell the right stories to their stakeholders. The user controls the level of automation, increasing the threshold as they grow comfortable with the system. The more they trust the system, the more they utilize automation, and the more time they get back – up to 50 hours a month, to be exact. Time to learn, develop, and grow; time to collaborate with cross-functional teams; or time for work-life balance.
The transition to a more strategic approach – and to happier, more productive employees with more longevity – requires a combination of an organizational mindset shift, collaboration, improved technology, and trust in that technology. With the right systems and the right partners, it’s possible.
Don’t let concerns around your workforce keep you up at night. We see the struggle hoteliers are facing to find and retain good talent, and we can help. To learn more about how N2Pricing can unlock your team’s time and help address the workforce challenges you are facing, connect with an expert on our team.