To attract new guests and retain existing ones, hotels must offer high-quality services. These days people don’t just want to spend a night in a hotel, they want to feel at home. The hospitality of the staff, the excellent cuisine, the first-rate cleaning services and the friendly receptionists are something that every guest seeks to find in a hotel. They say that something that can be measured can be improved. This is absolutely true in the hospitality industry, where the competition really goes haywire. In fact, to improve performance and plan for the future, it is very important to be aware of current performance. Any hotel that claims to be successful must have a vision and strategic plans. To monitor the implementation of adopting a strategy, hotel managers and owners need reliable and effective strategic management and performance appraisal tools, as well as the balanced scorecard that is widely used in various industries.
As previously stated, housekeeping and cleaning services are extremely important, especially for five-star hotels. Guests want to sleep in clean beds, shower in clean bathrooms, and return to a clean hotel suit every time they leave. Cleanliness is perhaps the strongest association with a hotel. Cleaning efficiency can be measured in different ways. Evaluating customer opinions is one of them. However, the reviews tell us about something that has already happened or has not happened, while the top hotel managers need information about the current cleaning performance. This is where the balanced scorecard comes in.
As is known, the balanced scorecard is used to evaluate key performance indicators, which are measures that represent critical success factors for various aspects of business operation. If we talk about cleaning, we must select the most important KPIs related to cleaning and cleaning services. What KPIs are most relevant to cleaning? In this article we will name some of them.
Let’s take a key performance indicator as the number of rooms per chambermaid. It can happen that a cleaning assistant takes care of too many hotel suits, negatively influencing the quality of cleaning services. If this is the case, the human resources department of a particular hotel has to hire more cleaning staff. Rather, it may turn out that a housekeeping attendant is regularly cleaning the only suits and can handle more work.
Laundry services should also be properly evaluated. Sleeping on dirty sheets is definitely a bad idea. It is possible to assess key performance indicators such as bed linen change per stay, guest linen change requests, and more. Regular vacuuming is also important and therefore needs to be measured. The same applies to all other cleaning procedures.
Using the balanced scorecard not only helps you measure the current performance of cleaning tasks, but also saves costs and makes rational use of cleaning personnel, tools and cleaning equipment. Without a doubt, cleaning services are part of the general hotel services that always need to be improved. By implementing goals in this area, the cleaning staff contributes to the implementation of financial goals.