Driving Guest Experience with Operational Excellence

“It’s definitely improved our guest experience…it’s a really helpful training tool” 

Running a multisite hospitality business means juggling a lot, from housekeeping logistics to breakfast rushes, and making sure guests always have a great experience. But when your team is stretched thin in some areas and underutilised in others, it’s hard to know where to make changes to your rota that will actually work and help you to keep driving guest experience.

Striking the right balance between cost and coverage, so you can maximise on sales opportunities without spending more on your labour is the ultimate goal of any Operations Director and General Manager.  

You likely already have a system in that is helping you to manage your labour just fine, but with upwards of hundreds of thousands of pounds in cost pressures since April, perhaps you are feeling frustrated with the amount of time and productivity you are getting out of your rotas. 

In order to drive performance and guest experience, you need to understand missed sales opportunities, reach beyond your current practices and align your tech with your unique business goals, which is exactly what Maddy Sinclair, General Manager of The Northey in Wiltshire did with The Operational Excellence Programme: 

“It started off by looking at our existing deployment, what we’re already doing, talking through the needs of the business, the different things that make the business unique. For example, eight of our hotel rooms are in a completely different building at the bottom of the garden.” 

Our team of experts worked with the teams on-site to help unify processes, deploy teams more effectively, and build habits that drive long-term success.

 “We did a walk round of the business with ourselves, head chef, head housekeeper, ops manager, S4labour, just to get a feel for what we were doing on a day-to-day basis. Then we looked at putting together base rota and a high sales week rota.”

 

 “It really illustrated a need for cross training. You are looking at your slack and your stress, and we had a situation where in the mornings our housekeepers were starting at seven, cleaning the pub, and then kind of waiting around for rooms to check out.

 

There was definitely a lot of slack there. At the same time, when everyone comes down for breakfast at once, it’s very busy. So, it was a bit of stress front of house. Those two things led us to cross training our housekeepers so that now for an hour in the mornings they help with breakfast whilst they’re waiting for the rooms to be ready. In the kitchen 10-10 is kind of the shift that the chefs do, whereas we’ve now looked at staggered start times. You don’t need everybody in at ten. You can phase it throughout the morning and it, it really helps to kind of have the numbers and the data to back it up when you’re having those conversations.” 

 

“I think it’s definitely improved our guest experience, particularly when the pub’s quiet. We’re always looking for how we can save labour when those sales drop and the Goldilocks numbers and that deployment graph have been really useful in looking at where we can afford to save labour and where we do need to prioritise keeping those hours in.”   

 

“There is more of an understanding. It’s a really helpful training tool, especially with team leaders or junior assistant managers that are still learning.”