As a hotel manager, you know the importance of honest, constructive reviews—after all, you’re constantly searching for ways to improve your guest feedback program.
But how much time and energy do you spend improving your employee feedback program? If you’re still using all the methods hotel managers were using 10 years ago, it’s time to switch things up.
1. Give Ongoing Feedback
The annual performance evaluation, which used to be a standard practice in every organization in the country, is definitely going out of fashion. In fact, Accenture—one of the largest companies in the world—recently announced its 330,000 employees will no longer have yearly reviews. Instead, they’ll get ongoing feedback
This trend is a great one to adopt within your hotel. After all, by the time the performance review rolls around, any issues you mention have probably been going on for a while. But when you’re regularly giving your team members feedback, you can address problems as soon as they come up. Furthermore, today’s workers are incredibly enthusiastic about feedback. Give it early and often, and you’ll be rewarded with higher retention rates (always a plus in the hospitality industry!)
2. Use Employee “Previews”
Although regular check-ins are great, there’s one major disadvantage to reviewing the work people have already done: They can’t go into the past and undo their mistakes
However, with employee previews, you can prevent many mistakes from being made in the first place. During these sessions, you sit down with your employees, discuss the hotel’s major goals, then identify their individual goals and how they match the hotel’s objectives. At each check-in, your employees share their progress.
Here’s how that might look:
You: So, how are you coming in with your goal to generate 20% more event sign-ups?
Employee: Pretty good! After our last check-in, I decided to start reaching out to alumni of the local university to see if they’d be interested in holding any club functions here. Of the 15 people I emailed, five have responded.
You: Have you modified anything about your approach since last time?
Employee: Yup–since you mentioned people might be turned off by getting calls at 7 A.M., I’ve started waiting till 9.
As you can see, employee previews still allow you to course-correct, but they do so much in a much more positive manner.
3. Use an App
Are you using tech to gather feedback from your guests? If so, you understand the advantages: it’s easier, more convenient, and more accurate than most other methods. You can get those same benefits by implementing an employee feedback app
Most of these apps let your staff anonymously share their thoughts or satisfaction level. You can also pose staff-wide questions, like “How do you feel about the monthly team volunteer days?” Some of these tools will even analyze the data for you, so you have a deeper understanding of what to address.
If you’re interested in using an app, check out Hppy, TapMyBack, or TINYPulse.
Implement these changes, and your staff will reward you with higher engagement, better performance, and useful feedback of their own.