Staffing a hotel is unlike any other 24/7 business. For hotels the workload can fluctuate daily so you need to understand your workload or have a flexible arrangement in place. Most hotels do not know what their staffing requirements are a long time in advance, so they are staffed on a week by week basis or have to have special arrangements in place to maximise flexibility. Maximising flexibility and minimising costs is a delicate balance. You need to understand your workload, what it is and what it could be. Then create procedures for every circumstance. Once these procedures are in place, it is a simple matter of switching between them. To operate efficiently we recommend using annualised hours with a banked hours system. To cover for holidays you need to either operate a holidays included shift pattern or have an effective holiday management plan. To exasperate the situation, your staff will want their holidays during your peak season. To help you we have written a series of books, each covering a different topic with tools and techniques to help you run your business more effectively. We have software to help you run your operation week by week or for a year ahead. VisualrotaX keeps track of your staffs hours, their Bank (if you are using one) and their holidays and sickness. With built in features like highlighting any shift you are short on or who is sick or on holiday, you have all the information at your fingertips to move staff around. VisualrotaX enables you to move your staff around to minimise the effects of peaks and troughs in occupancy levels. You can bring in more staff when needed and give them days off during slack periods. The program keeps track of their hours and shifts, so everyone gets exactly the right number of hours of work, but your costs are minimised. A hotel has many different areas of business with different demands and different solutions, but that does not mean you require a different approach for each area to optimise resources, costs or income. There is no point in each area trying to set up its own way of doing things. Unfortunately that is what usually happens. A consistent logical analysis and a practical logical solution must produce a better result than a dozen different ways of looking at the same set of problems. Hotels are about people, and people are fairly consistent and hence predictable, whether it is the staff or the customers we can anticipate what is required. Our problem can be split into a few sectors: •  calculating the workload and converting it into man-hours of work; •  calculating how many hours of work each person can provide towards the calculated workload; • calculating the number of staff in each skill set to employ; • determining the terms of employment to run the operation; • calculating the cost of the operation; • calculating the income generated by the workload; • organising the hours from the staff to match the workload; • setting up the shift pattern. Well, it might feel like an impossible task.  To put together a coherent plan to do all of these tasks. That is why it is done so rarely. But more importantly, who could do it anyway and then implement it into all the different areas of the hotel and across all the hotels in the chain? Also, would the results be worth the effort? Well with an annual documented turnover of staff in the hotel business being between 65% and 132% (depends on the quality of the hotel), trying to create a stable environment with the level of service you would like can be a nightmare. These figures do not include job turnover, which is where staff change jobs within the hotel or transfer across hotels. What is the point of planning more than a few weeks ahead if few stay for a whole year, and yet, that is precisely the point. You know your likely workload months ahead. If you don't, then we can help you calculate it. So you know what positions you need to fill when, you just don't know exactly who will be there until closer to the time. We can show you how to make this a simple task. Each newly promoted manager is often thrown in at the deep end and charged with staffing their department within a budget. They have to do this, it is what they are paid to do, but without a formal training package or a company-wide method. They have to rely on the last manager's method so as not to upset the staff too much, and bring their own experience into the fray. No wonder everyone has to invent their own method.

Hotel revenues come from events, tourism and business travel. Or to put it another way room occupancy, food and beverage demand.

The above are examples of how a group of managers, all in the same hotel, organise their individual departments, each to his own!. How much simpler and easier it would be if you could call on our services to help start the process. Then at the same time, we could train each manager in the best way to organise the roster for your specific requirements. Points to note, and check for in your own hotel rosters. * Do you use computer print outs, or are some handwritten? * Do you use the same time frame or are some for one week at a time, some for two weeks, some for four weeks, some for a calendar month? * Do you total up the number of shifts? * Do you total up the number of hours? * Where are these totals placed on the roster? Some have totals on the left, some on the right, some under the roster. * Do you define the shifts on the roster? Where do you put these definitions? Some define the shifts in the roster, others have the definitions under the roster, others above the roster, some have them randomly throughout the roster. * Are your rosters consistent? If not then it makes it very difficult to know what is happening. None of the above examples have any indicators regarding workload, such as occupancy or special events. It doesn't have to be like that. For instance. The events calendar and room occupancy determines many factors involved in their workloads, and these are known fairly well in advance so they can be recorded daily on the roster. 

Designed on the computer but filled in by hand. No calculations at all.

Typed on computer with some calculations

Mostly done on computer but still needed hand written notes

Filled in by hand. No calculations, and no way of knowing if you made a mistake

Created on Computer with some hand written notes. Again no calculations

Mostly done on computer yet still needs handwritten notes for just two people. Fortunately two people check this rota