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Behind the scenes of hotel housekeeping

23 Oct 2013 - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

Have you ever arrived at your hotel early and huffed and puffed because your room wasn’t ready?

There’s a good reason for that: Preparing a hotel room for a new guest can take twice as long as cleaning a room for a guest who is staying over. For a new arrival the room maid has to go through the full inspection list, which may have around 100 check points. There are so many things that must be attended to that you wouldn’t think of, including making sure the proper TV Guide is there, checking for stains on the amenity cards and ensuring the bed linens are completely wrinkle free.
I would go so far as to call housekeeping, when properly executed - the ‘unsung heroes’ of guest satisfaction. The guest experience within each and every room, as far as cleanliness goes, is a critical factor in ensuring that your guests keep coming back.

An US Army General once emphatically stated “it’s not glamorous, it’s not typically high scoring, it can be plain boring at times, but I’m going to go so far as to say that the infantry is the most important role in the Army”. In the hospitality industry the housekeeping department must surely be the most important. It has the most staff, the largest proportion of hours to cover and also the one the guests notice first and foremost if anything is wrong.

Depending on the size of hotel, the housekeeping department can have the following staff: Housekeeper and assistant housekeepers, floor supervisors, room maids/boys, public area attendants, linen keeper, linen maids, seamstress, laundry supervisor, valets and laundrymen. The staff hours of cover depend on the hotel and type of guest attracted by the hotel- business people require different time schedules to those on holiday including families. Staff therefore, need to be scheduled accordingly and in a ratio corresponding to the number of guests staying in the hotel. Hotels operate on a 24-hour/365 days fluctuating cycle of guest occupancy and unless one has to have the right number of staff on duty - it shows. Fortunately, most people book ahead and the workload is known well in advance, especially during peak periods.

The staffing requirement will depend on the occupancy of the hotel. It is not very difficult to get quite good estimates of staff numbers based on average times to do tasks, such as cleaning a room. By establishing this information, one can then allocate a pre-determined number of rooms per room maid/boy, per shift. It is also then quite possible to estimate the total number of staff needed in a year for a task.

This however, is a very simplistic approach and in reality can be extremely challenging. When one considers the high variability factor of guests leaving or entering their rooms at different times of the day or night, the mix of ‘dirty’ rooms vacated by guests, requiring timely and efficient ‘cleaning’ for arriving guests, managing the day-time cleanup of occupied rooms, the evening ‘turndown’ service, staff absenteeism from sickness or leave, and a host of other things – it can push any housekeeper over the edge. Good housekeepers succeed in finding a way of effectively sharing the yearly workload on a day-by-day basis. To carry out these myriad tasks just how do you allocate the maids/boys so that you have the right number on every day? Well, the answer depends on where you are at the moment. An existing hotel staffed, is different to a new hotel unstaffed and that is entirely a different story which I will address on another day.

Preventing housekeeping injuries
Housekeeping staff on a daily basis clean 14-16 rooms and make up to 8000 movements during an eight hour shift. It is a physically demanding job which primarily involves making beds, cleaning rooms, bathtubs, sinks, fixtures removing stains      and vacuuming. It is a profession highly prone to sprains and strains and          hoteliers must cultivate work practices that prevent injuries from occurring.         Some suggestions to reduce injuries in the housekeeping department are:
- Providing lighter service carts that are well maintained can go a long way in preventing injuries.

Tires should be fully-inflated and wheels properly aligned which minimizes the force required to operate a cart. The housekeeping staff should         be trained to push the carts as opposed to pulling them in ignorance.

-   Some hotels have done away with carts and room staff work with hand caddies. The team ensures that the linen closets on each floor are fully stocked with supplies.

-   Providing lighter vacuum cleaners with low noise levels should also be considered.

- Staff should wear shoes with plenty of cushioning to minimize stress on the back.

-   Our bodies function best in neutral and comfortable positions. When making beds, housekeeping staff should be trained to kneel or squat and bend from knees rather than the back. To increase reach and access to distant places, step stools and other tools with long handles should be used when cleaning bathrooms.

-   Room maids/boys should step inside the bathtub to clean the walls and back of the tub, rather than do cleaning by standing on the edge of the tub.

- Training plays a key role in accident prevention in the housekeeping department. Topics should include knowledge of workplace hazards, lifting methods and pre-shift warm up sessions. Following the guidelines outlined above along with other simple safe practices will help you keep your housekeeping department safe whilst avoiding injuries to employees that can severely affect employee performance, productivity and morale.

Are hotel rooms really clean?
I am certain you expect a clean room upon arrival. As you open the door to your hotel room, you will not find it in shambles or already occupied by another guest, although, this can occur in a badly run hotel. More likely, the hotel room will appear neat and orderly, but what lies beneath the appearance? As a general rule, hotel rooms have to be really clean. However, not every room is, since some room-maids/boys do a less good job than others.
The problem persists where housekeepers fail to go behind those that under perform and inspect their work. This had to be done in every room that was cleaned, every day! A housekeeper is ultimately held accountable if a room is found to be below standards and therefore needs to stay on top of this task. I recall an excellent housekeeper, who, when she found a room not to be clean, called back the room maid to redo the job. She also put the floor supervisor on the mat. All of them hated this, and in next to no time, would do everything in their power to get it right the first time. The biggest problem is always the beds. This will not bring much relief to those that already have phobias about sleeping on hotel beds. Changing the linens on hotel beds is a lot of work. Especially in hotels that have triple sheeting. Because of this, some room attendants will try to cut corners by not changing the sheets, and only remaking the bed that was slept by the previous occupant, in the previous night. This is called, “popping sheets”.

Before you panic, let me assure you that there is an industry wide trick that is done to prevent this from happening. Anyone found ‘popping’ the first time is usually given a written warning. Typically, after two warnings he or she should be discontinued. No one can guarantee that the sheets are clean, but I can tell you that there are measures in place to prevent you from ever sleeping on a dirty bed- unless of course these measures are not put to practice. I have encountered many room maids and room boys who took great pride in their work, and many that could care less.

Housekeeping is a hard job, and most of them only make minimum wage. This is because unlike the restaurant and bar, which are revenue centres, the housekeeping department is looked upon as a cost center. Conveniently overlooked is that 80 percent of revenue from the room rate goes towards meeting bottom-line expenses. Until hotels raise the bar on what they are willing to pay these people, they will only be able to expect to get what they pay for.

Cleaning practices must evolve
The first thing you do upon entering the room is turn on the light. Light switches are one of the many places germs are waiting. The cleaning staff probably does their utmost best to provide superior service, but do you really think they remembered the light switch? Probably not.

Next, you grab the remote before flopping down on the soft, comfortable bed to relax and watch some TV. You have just exposed yourself to so many viruses and bacteria that are lurking on the remote control. Even if the maid / boy diligently scrubbed the room, odds are he or she did not clean off the remote control. Imagine the dirt and grime on that thing. It is probably equivalent to the computer keyboard in an office.

The germs that cause half of all colds are capable of surviving a good twelve hours on hard surfaces. For this reason, the remote, alarm clock, and lamp are all suspect. Last year, researchers from the University of Houston swabbed 19 hotel room hideouts, from door handles to headboards, and found the bacterium E. coli hiding on 81 percent of the surfaces, including the remote control, the telephone and the bedside lamp. The maid cart too may be a villain, and not the hero in the fight against contamination, according to the study, which found bacteria blooming on mops, sponges and on over-used dusters used to clean rooms. Identifying high-risk items within a hotel room would allow housekeeping managers to strategically design cleaning practices and allocate time to efficiently reduce the potential health risks posed by microbial contamination in hotel rooms.

I fear however, given the dispassionate manner in which many Managers’ view the role of housekeeping that this will take a long time in the making – especially in Sri Lankan hotels. Meanwhile, what type of things can we do to protect ourselves from invisible, uninvited guests in our hotel room? First, choose a reputable establishment. A hotel with a good reputation will not ensure cleanliness, but it may improve the odds. Word-of-mouth advertising is important to hotels, so find out on the internet, what others think about the hotel before you select the hotel for your stay.

(Shafeek Wahab has an extensive background in Hospitality Management spanning over 30 years. He has held key managerial responsibilities in internationally renowned hotel chains, both locally and abroad, including his last held position as Head of Branding for a leading Hotel Group in Sri Lanka. Now focusing on corporate education, training, consulting and coaching he can be contacted on [email protected])

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Behind the scenes of hotel housekeeping

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