Focus On Productivity: How COVID taught us to do more with less resources...
17 experts shared their view
According to the Global Travel Staffing Barometer, due to the pandemic, travel companies around the world have laid off or furloughed over half a million people, and the number of LinkedIn users in the hospitality space applying the #opentowork hashtag to their profiles grows day after day. Most hotels are struggling to run operations with skeleton crews only, yet they do not have any real alternative. In some countries, in fact, the financial help coming from governments is close to zero, so the only option for these hotels is to get rid of "superfluous" staff and try to run their businesses with a fraction of their employees. This forced most properties to heavily concentrate and focus on productivity, trying to get the best out of dire circumstances. How will this situation affect hotels? Can a global reset actually be a good thing, after all, forcing the industry to get more done with fewer resources? Or will this trend damage the guest experience in the long run?
Whether its because of labor shortages or ongoing cost cutting measures, it is clear that hospitality will struggle with labor in the upcoming months from property to corporate. This means that organizations must rethink every aspect of the business to find efficiencies, but also revenue opportunities. With the strong operations mindset in hospitality, the tendency will be to squeeze as much cost out as possible. The challenge for most organizations will be to achieve the delicate balance among cost cutting, revenue generation and maintaining the customer experience. Too much focus on any one will negatively impact the others. Technology can automate or streamline many processes that now are performed by people, both in operations and back office, many of which should not impact the guest experience at all. This means organizations need to be prepared to make technology investments in the short term that will ensure labor savings, cost savings or revenue generation in the longer term. As companies evaluate these investments, it will be important to consider three questions: how much cost can this save? how much revenue will it generate? how will it impact the guest experience? Leaving any one of these answers out will result in a negative impact to the organization in the long term.