How to Write a Hotel Employee Operations Manual

No matter whether you’re a big hotel or a small-town accommodation complex, writing an employee hotel operation manual is the best way to refine your business processes.

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This is a guest post by Mary Walton

As a hotel manager, life would run so much smoother if all your employees were operating on the same page. No matter whether you’re a big hotel or a small-town accommodation complex, writing an employee operation manual is the best way to refine your business processes.

This is so everything operates effortlessly with everybody knowing what they should be doing and when they should be doing it. These manuals are also incredibly helpful when it comes to training new members of staff.

Not sure where you’d even begin? No worries, here’s how to write an operations manual to improve your business logistics.

Define Your Employees

Before you even set about writing your manual, you need to start collecting information about your business in such a way that you can be sure that you don’t miss out any details. When writing an operations manual, there are two ways to go about it.

Firstly, you could create a ‘universal manual’ that applies to all employees. Alternatively, you could write a different section in your manual for each unique department. This approach allows you to be a lot more direct, specific and detailed. 

Donna J. Cornwell, the editor for Paper Fellows, explains;

“When creating an operational manual for your business, it’s important that you get your current employees involved, especially when describing their particular roles as no one knows them better than they do.”

Acquire a Job Role List

Next, you’ll want to list out all the job titles and roles that you have within your business. This may include customer service, waiters, waitresses, concierges, chefs, cooks, booking managers, HR and marketing. It’s really up to you, depending on the roles within your business.

You’ll want to develop and create a comprehensive description of each role and all the tasks and core functions that employees in these roles are expected to carry out.

For this part of the manual, you may want to select a couple of the employees to help ensure that you don’t miss anything out while creating this section.

Add an Operation Section

After you have compiled a list of data about your job roles, you’ll want to focus on a section the relates to the everyday running of your establishment. In this section, you’ll want to describe situations that your employees may commonly or rarely find themselves with and how to deal with it effectively and professionally.

This may include what they’ll do if they lose a customer booking on the computer system if something goes wrong in the kitchen department or even if just the way you would like your employees to meet and greet your customers.

Additionally, you may want to include information such as what to do in a medical emergency, what to do in a fire situation as well as listing emergency and key individual numbers in the case of any other event.

You can also include information on your employee’s holiday allowance, pensions scheme, healthcare scheme and any other information they may want to look up or refer to.

Write the First Draft

Once all your information has been compiled, it’s time to set about writing your first draft. When creating certain sections, feel free to bring back the employees mentioned above so they can ensure you don’t miss out any details.

You’ll want to lay everything out as much as possible in an easy to read and understandable format with clear chapters, sections and subheadings.

Perfect Your Manual

Once your first draft has been created, you can set about perfecting your book, ready to be released to your employees. Leave your manual for a few days before returning to it, and you’ll be able to edit it with a fresh mindset.

You may also want a few of your employees to read through it for feedback, ensuring that you covered all the points that you wanted to cover. Proofreading is also a huge part of the process. This means continuously reading through your content to ensure accuracy in the grammar, spelling and punctuation, providing your manual with a high level of readability. Proofreading can be a time-consuming process, especially if you’re trying to manage and run a business. If this is the case, you can employ the help of a professional proofreading service, such as Big Assignments or Ox Essays.

Writing your own operational manual can be hard work, and it’s very time-consuming if you want to ensure perfection. Once you have collected all your data, you can also seek the help of a qualified writer within a professional writing service, such as Grade on Fire (this service is suggested by Huffington Post team), to write one on your behalf.

The overall aim to be able to provide your employees with a complete and comprehensive manual that can answer all their questions and provides them with all the information they need to run your business.