To attract new guests and retain existing ones, hotels must offer high-quality services. These days, people not only want to spend a night in a hotel, they also want to feel at home. The hospitality of the staff, the excellent cuisine, the top-notch cleaning services and the friendly receptionists are something that all guests seek to find in a hotel. They say that anything that can be measured can be improved. This is absolutely true in the hotel industry, where the competition really gets crazy. In fact, to improve performance and plan for the future, it is very important to know current performance. Any hotel that claims to be successful needs to have strategic plans and vision. To monitor the implementation of adopting a strategy, hotel managers and owners need reliable and effective performance evaluation and strategic management tools, just like the balanced scorecard that is widely used in various industries.
As already stated above, cleaning and housekeeping services are extremely important, especially for five-star hotels. Guests want to sleep in clean beds, shower in clean bathrooms, and return to a clean hotel suit every time they leave. Housekeeping is perhaps the strongest association with a hotel. Cleaning efficiency can be measured in different ways. Rating customer reviews is one of them. However, reviews inform us about something that has or has not happened, while senior hotel managers need information about the current performance of the housekeeping service. This is where the balanced scorecard comes into play.
As is known, the balanced scorecard is used to assess key performance indicators, which are measures that represent critical success factors for various aspects of business management. If we talk about cleaning, we must select the most important KPIs related to cleaning and cleaning services. What key performance indicators are most relevant to cleaning? In this article we will name some of them.
Let’s take as a key performance indicator the number of rooms per chambermaid. It may happen that one housekeeping assistant deals with too many hotel suits, negatively influencing the quality of cleaning services. If this is the case, the human resources department of a particular hotel needs to hire more cleaning staff. Just the opposite, it may turn out that a housekeeping assistant is regularly cleaning the only several suits and can handle more work.
Laundry services should also be properly evaluated. Sleeping with dirty sheets is definitely a bad idea. Key performance indicators such as linen change per stay, guest linen change requests, etc. can be evaluated. Regular vacuuming is also important and should therefore be measured. The same applies to all other cleaning procedures.
Using a balanced scorecard not only helps measure current cleaning performance, but also saves costs and makes rational use of clean personnel, cleaning tools and equipment. Undoubtedly, housekeeping services are a part of the hotel’s general services that always need to be improved. By implementing goals in this area, the custodial staff contributes to the implementation of the financial goals.