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Between interacting with guests to enhance the brand and wrangling schedules to balance business needs with employee needs, managers have a million things on their plates every day. Automating how they handle scheduling frees significant time to focus on other tasks, building the business, enhancing guest experience and engaging staff. Automation requires an in-depth knowledge of hospitality’s ever-changing needs as well as a granular knowledge of employee work requirements. Merging those means the difference between unhappy guests and the intent to return and recommend. Choosing the right workforce management solution that handles every aspect of scheduling for the distinctive needs of hospitality is a key differentiator. A labor management system is not just an end of the period reporting tool. To be effective it must apply science in a proactive process to truly help the business. Using transactional data to predict how a consumer may act on a given day, a useful system generates a statistically created schedule. But that schedule has to be built for hospitality. The foundationThe basis of manufacturing is raw materials and machines, and planning relies primarily on sourcing. If you have raw materials and machinery, you can estimate product output and schedule your people with confidence that you won’t have a sudden change in demand. Once the raw materials are consistent and the flow is constant, manufacturing can then schedule the people and machines needed to ensure the production lines work well and that the through-put meets machine performance expectations. Duong Truong, Director of Human Resources at Whitmore and Jet-Lube, notes that raw material availability contributes greatly to scheduling and can derail planned production if materials are unavailable. The demand, though, is a constant. Hospitality’s foundation is service based on labor. The first concern in hospitality is understanding people – what the consumer expects to receive and how to meet that expectation in the most efficient, cost-effective manner. Labor in hospitality is the greatest expense and ensuring it’s available when and where your customers need it is tricky. When demand is fluid, dynamic/optimized workforce management becomes all the more important. Demand dynamicsCustomer demands for all products tend to follow a bell curve, waxing and waning depending on the needs of the market served. The curve, however, takes place over wildly differing time frames for manufacturing as compared to hospitality. Where manufacturing’s curve happens over weeks or months and with inventory acting as a buffer, hospitality’s curve varies by the time of day, the day of the week, and more. Thus, the impact of demand needs to be measured in small increments of time throughout the day for scheduling to have maximum impact.
In hospitality, the human is the “machine,” and optimizing a schedule for a human requires a much different approach than manufacturing. The factors involved are incredibly nuanced and can be difficult to predict, ranging from the day and time of day, time of year, weather patterns, seasons, customer expectations, and more. Customer expectations, in particular, drive demand and change in the blink of an eye. Predicting what can happen one Monday to the next or even one lunch rush to the next ensures your staff is available when and where your customer wants service. To succeed, managers need to be able to accurately forecast demand that changes from minute to minute throughout the day. And this is a key component of an optimizing labor performance system. The crystal ballForecasting is the key to ensuring demand is met. The trick is forecasting how many people will come in and when to meet demand. Manufacturing forecasts months in advance with little variation in employee schedules because the business model simply doesn’t need to. It has inventory, in general to meet short term variations. When variations do occur, manufacturers have time to plan for changes and can make up for any lost time or increased demand by simply adding another shift or more machinery. This adds a level of leniency in scheduling that hospitality simply doesn’t have. Hospitality does long-term forecasts weeks in advance for budgeting and some revenue optimization purposes, but typically projects volumes and schedules employees one or two weeks in advance that are influenced by daily fluctuations. Thus, forecasting needs to be as accurate as possible, to develop accurate schedules. In addition, schedules must account for all employee requirements as well as what demand may come in that very moment, as discussed above. The sheer number of factors that go into building a weekly schedule for a busy hotel is dizzying. Workforce management solutionsTraditionally, hospitality has been forced to adapt workforce management solutions that are optimized not for the human factor but for machines with a steady input and output. A workforce management solution that only optimizes for machines cannot optimize effectively for humans or the demands of other humans. It doesn’t understand consumer or employee needs and expectations or give managers enough feedback to better manage their human workforce. The alternative in hospitality has been spreadsheets, which aren’t sophisticated enough to consider scheduling conflicts, work rules, PTO requests, preferred shifts, and more. They are also unable to account for extreme swings in demand that exist in the day-to-day life of a hotel employee. Hospitality requires all these subtleties and more to be factored into every moment of every day. Advanced technologies can do more than a simple spreadsheet ever could and faster than a human brain. A properly configured, optimized, workforce management system frees significant time in schedule generation alone just by staffing to a typical customer’s ideal service level. It can also identify and predict consumer behavior based on a “typical” day, week, month, etc., and consider the nuances of your customer and business. The right workforce management solution takes this huge amount of data and applies it to scheduling, placing employees in the right place at the right time to handle any consumer need. And it clears manager time by automating the cumbersome task of scheduling. Understanding your needsIn hospitality, customer experience is the final product, delivered on demand by humans when, where, and how the customer wants it. Quality service is the goal while recognizing that costs must also be taken into account. Service industries represent the epitome of the “just-in-time” concept, but quality is entirely subjective, driven by customer desires in the moment. That moment can be affected by a myriad of other factors, too, such as weather conditions, disruptions in traffic patterns, local events, and more. The key to meeting customer expectations and creating the desired experience is performance management. A system for hospitality needs to be built from the ground up to accommodate the unique factors that create a quality product for the service industry. The dynamic nature of the business demands equally dynamic staffing and a workforce management system that can keep up with both. Anything less does a disservice to your business, your employees, and your guests.
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By Ralph Varble, VP of Operations, UniFocus - One of the keys to achieving success in hospitality hinges on your ability to place the right people in the right place at the right time to serve your guests. How to best schedule staff to comply with regulations and still meet customer expectations still challenges the industry. How can your business thrive when it must schedule employees without knowing demand? And demand in hospitality shifts constantly.
When asked what contributes to shifting schedules in manufacturing, our interviewees listed machinery breaking down, unavailable raw materials, and unplanned rush orders, all of which can affect hospitality, too. However, the shortest schedule change was for unplanned demand, but even that change gave employees at least 24 hours’ notice of the change, with most manufacturers we spoke to giving notice of a schedule change from 2 days to a week in advance.