blog_img-46-2023-04-27

5 Tips to Improve Your Hotel’s Internal Communication

Hotel managers are constantly looking for ways to improve their internal communication strategy. But why is internal communication so impactful and necessary? The short answer is: streamlined communications leads to efficient task management. 

Effective task management will lead to operational excellence and operational excellence leads to exceptional guest experiences. This recipe for success is rooted in your hotel’s internal communication.

A good start is to have fluid, internal communication, but where do you go from there? How do we improve it? Here are 5 tips that will help you improve your hotel’s internal communication with the help of hotel operations software like ALICE:

1. Reduce radio traffic

Radio traffic is noisy, has a high risk for miscommunication, and is nearly impossible to track. Radio traffic should be reserved for emergency situations and you should strive to have all internal communication done through a hospitality task management system such as ALICE. We have all seen or experienced an employee having to break their great interaction with a guest to silence a conversation that was revealing a little too much.

The best way to reduce radio traffic is to use internal communication tools. Show your staff the benefits of leaving notes and communicating within the actual service request, in real time. This effective communication will help employees who feel they must stop what they are doing to take notes. With ALICE’s communications platforms, these notes are already conveniently located right where they need them to be, within the service request.

ALICE Service Delivery tickets are an opportunity for employees to communicate efficiently. Using an operations platform, eliminates the risk of losing paper notes, engages employees and ensures that the entire department is aligned. All team members can find all the notes and tickets in the same place for each request. Nothing is lost, everything is organized, and easily accessible.

2. Use the feedback you gather from internal notes to set small goals and achievements

Internal notes can become a gold mine for identifying the challenges your teams are facing on a daily basis. Leverage these findings by sharing them consistently with your team. Encourage your staff to use notes to document discrepancies as they arise during their shifts.

This will allow you the ability to monitor the notes and understand obstacles the team is facing. These obstacles can be used to set weekly focus initiatives. The goal here is to make your staff feel heard and encourage the tracking of discrepancies.

Here are examples of weekly initiative uncovered from staff notes monitoring:

  1. Morning requests were not passed on
  2. Front Desk not giving enough details on what was broken
  3. Maintenance did not report that there was a DND and the request stayed opened

ALICE’s ticketing functionality can assist with all hotel staff communication, but you can also use ALICE’s reporting functions for team standup meetings to discuss areas of opportunities.

3. Eliminate the language barrier

Ensure your staff knows how to set their preferred language. One of the benefits of having operational software in your hotel is the ability to receive instant notifications of changes. This benefit can drastically be reduced if there is a language barrier between the two staff members.

The ability of staff to send and receive messages in their preferred language can dramatically improve your internal communication between your departments because your staff is fully comfortable in what they are communicating. They no longer will spend precious time proofreading. It is a beautiful thing for me to respond to you in my native language and you to receive my communication translated in your preferred language setting.

4. Encourage cross-department knowledge sharing

Sharing your identified weekly initiatives with other departments will highlight and foster a “one hotel” team mentality. It is easy to become a silo within a hotel where the Front Office has completely separate operating procedures than Housekeeping teams. Bring them together with the one thing that binds them, the goal to improve the guest experience.

Each hotel staff has the same goal at the heart of the task and that is to make the hotel guest happy. The initiatives you set from the information you gather from the Internal Notes are going to benefit all departments. You will spark a cross-departmental responsibility when you share your weekly focus and make them weekly conversations.

5. Be adaptable!

As a hotelier, it is in your DNA to keep changing and adapting as needed. Realistically what worked six months ago might be outdated today. As new staff joins the team good habits become a bit easier to embed in the operation.

This is a slow and steady race. Having honest conversations with team members will lead to better processes, especially if a task is cross departmental. The ability to adjust to new conditions will keep you resilient when facing unforeseeable situations.

In this new normal, where our associates are wearing masks, you are having to establish sanitation procedures and creativity to new challenges are a must. It is just as important to look into internal communication and how it can bring a bit of routine to your day to day. Operational software like ALICE will help you meet your internal communication strategies.

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