C-Desk Technology | Old Vicarage | Rolleston | NG23 5SE | Tel: (+44) 01636 816466 | alec@visualrota.co.uk
Enquiries:
01636 816466
Budgeting
Budgeting is about knowing
how much the operation will
cost and then sticking to it. We
can tell you how many people
you will need, what overtime
hours will be required and how
to manage your resources
throughout the year effectively.
Resource
Management
HRM is about managing people
to get the best out of them. To
do this you need to employ the
right people, with the right
skills, in the right numbers.
We can tell you how many
people your operation needs
and how to deploy them
effectively to maximise their
productivity or optimise your
operation.
The aim of this book is to teach you
how to calculate how many staff you
need to run your operation.
The aim of this series of books is
to provide a reference guide for t
he types of available shift patterns
by way of supplying a total of
almost 300 unique shift patterns.
This book is about how to organise
staff holidays so that they do not
affect the operation. A Holidays
Included Shift Pattern will
accommodate everyone’s holiday
in the shift pattern.
This book looks at the details of
introducing and using Banked
Hours based on our experiences
with the many organisations
that use them.
This book not only includes easy to
follow examples of how to calculate
your Absence Rate, but also shows
you how to use your Absence Rate
to predict how absences will occur
in the future. This book has look-up
tables which convert Absence Rate
in to the number you would expect
to be off shift.
Shift working is also more fatiguing than
office hours working; this is especially
prevalent if working nights. However this
book is about minimising fatigue and the
effects of fatigue so that you can enjoy
the advantages of working shifts without
being too fatigued.
Managing holidays are the bane of all
managers. The aim of this book is to
show you some simple techniques to
relieve you of the burden. With a
special section on Office Hours, this
book is ideal for all managers.
Have you found that the year is just not
long enough to fit in all the holidays?
The aim of this book is to help
managers with their shift
operations. Holidays and absences
can play havoc with most operations
unless special procedures are in place.
This book provides the solutions used
by us when setting up a shift system.
These books and others are available from
Amazon, simply search using ‘jezewski moore’.
All prices subject to vat for UK based organisations.
Hotel Management
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
Typical Hotel
Structure
BLOGS
•
Holiday Entitlements,
•
Cover Shifts,
•
Easter,
•
Fair Holiday Scheduling,
•
High Sickness,
•
Forward Planning,
•
Skiing,
•
Frosty Mornings,
•
10-hour Shifts,
•
How Good is your Maths,
•
Unlimited Holidays,
•
Stagger Lunch,
•
Optimise Equipment,
•
Absence Management,
•
Christmas Presents,
•
Wedding Planners,
•
Bank Holidays,
•
Annualised Hours,
•
Inventory Modeling,
•
How Many Staff are needed,
•
Flexi-Time,
•
Cover for Sickness,
•
Global shift planning.
•
and many more
If you work in an office Monday-to-Friday’
did you know that if you work an extra
hour each day you can have an extra 30
days off each year? That’s a doubling of
your holidays and how’s that for improving
your, and your colleagues in the office,
work/life balance? This is just one example
we have created for our clients. We put
together some 250 examples for all sorts of
operations and decided to sell them as
Excel files that you can use for up to 50
staff.