231 | Culture Club: Your hotel’s work environment may be bad for business (Labor and Hiring Part 1)

09/25/19 • 29 min

Is your hotel a fun place to work? Do your employees look forward to spending their day at your hotel?

If the answers are no, then your business is in trouble.

Do you have difficulty keeping good employees? Do you see staff members whispering in huddled groups? Do you or your supervisors work behind closed doors?

If the answers are yes, then your business is in trouble.

Many hotel managers know how to build a culture of service to attract guests. At the same time, they may overlook the needs and expectations of the other people in the building.

Successful leaders not only focus on creating positive experiences that acquire guests and build customer loyalty, they expand those strategies to the hotel’s workforce to attract and keep good employees.

This episode of Lodging Leaders explores the concept of workplace culture, and why it matters, especially in today’s tight labor market.

We talk about how a positive work environment can make your hotel business, and how a toxic atmosphere can break it.

We interview Del Ross, chief revenue officer at Hotel Effectiveness; Carrie David, chief human resources officer at Interstate Hotels & Resorts; Chris Bennis, a recruiter with Snelling Hospitality; Bryan DeCort, executive vice president at Hotel Equities; and Nancy Curtin Morris, vice president of learning and people development at Hotel Equities.

Is your hotel a fun place to work? Do your employees look forward to spending their day at your hotel?

If the answers are no, then your business is in trouble.

Do you have difficulty keeping good employees? Do you see staff members whispering in huddled groups? Do you or your supervisors work behind closed doors?

If the answers are yes, then your business is in trouble.

Many hotel managers know how to build a culture of service to attract guests. At the same time, they may overlook the needs and expectations of the other people in the building.

This episode of Lodging Leaders explores the concept of workplace culture, and why it matters, especially in today’s tight labor market.

We talk about how a positive work environment can make your hotel business, and how a toxic atmosphere can break it.

Previous Episode

230 | Funding CapEx: New report tells what it takes for hotels to stay competitive

More than 20 years ago, a team of hotel industry consultants and asset managers got together to figure out how much hotels in the U.S. spend each year on property improvements and maintenance.

The idea was if owners and operators know in advance what it will cost to keep a hotel property up to date and in good working order, it would help them put the right amount of cash in reserve to deal with the expected ,as well as the unexpected.

In 1997, David Berins and Peggy Berg produced the industry’s first CapEx study. They recommended hotels increase their capital reserves from 3 percent, to 4 percent, to afford pending property improvement plans and inevitable equipment replacements.

Today, that 4 percent is still regarded as an industry standard. But modern day consultants say the reserve benchmark is woefully underestimated and CapEx planning is so much more complex than it was two decades ago.

So how are hotel owners and managers supposed to plan? And by how much?

In this episode, Lodging Leaders explores the latest CapEx report researched and published by two organizations – the International Society of Hospitality Consultants and the Hospitality Asset Managers Association – with the help of STR.

We feature David Berins of Berins & Co., who says he coined the CapEx abbreviation. We hear from Alan Benjamin of procurement firm Benjamin West, who has co-chaired the past several CapEx studies. And we talk to Matthew Hick of Access Point Financial, a specialty hotel finance company that lends for FF&E projects.

Next Episode

232 | Wage Pressures: How to plug cost leaks in your hotel’s labor pool (Labor and Hiring Part 2)

At the peak of a great upward climb from the Great Recession, the U.S. lodging industry is seeing a leveling off in business performance.

During the 25th annual Lodging Conference in Phoenix last week, many industry experts talked about a new normal of muted revenue gains and thinner profit margins as expenses continue to grow.

The biggest and fastest-growing operating expense in the hotel industry today is labor.

STR reports U.S. hotels saw labor costs grow an average 3.7 percent from 2016 through 2018. Those three years are the only period in the past 20 years in which labor costs exceeded revenue growth.

Although industry analysts cite much-talked-about causes of increased labor costs such as minimum wage laws and a tight employment market, some of the reasons your hotel is wrestling with the expense are not so obvious.

In this episode of Lodging Leaders – the second in a two-part series about hiring and labor – we explore how you can get a grip on labor costs, become more efficient in scheduling employee hours, and manage employees’ work expectations.

We hear from Del Ross, chief revenue officer at Hotel Effectiveness; Bryan DeCort, executive vice president at Hotel Equities; and Bruce Barishman, vice president of operational excellence at Interstate Hotels & Resorts. We also include excerpts from a presentation by economist Bernard Baumohl at The Lodging Conference.