Increasing teamwork at your reception desk

Hotel front desk – implementing these 5 tips will make your reception communicate better!

Fast and professional hotel service is a crucial aspect of every accommodation. Today we focus on establishing proper communication channels for your front desk.

1. Set team goals and motivate your hotel front desk.

The key element is to set clear team goals and motivate employees to pursue them. Aims may change depending on the time of the year. For example during high season the goal may be to provide the highest quality of customer service and to collect positive guests reviews. On the other hand in the low season the goal may be to clean the workplace, analyze the high season`s statistics and prepare for the new one.

2. Keeping a hotel front desk diary and a team calendar.

Planning and ensuring good information flow between coworkers are important elements of teamwork. Keeping a team calendar allows to designate deadlines of particular tasks, store in one place the availability of a team and easily schedule dates of team events. Keeping a reception diary provides a good flow of information between your employees as all members have access to them, even if they are temporarily absent or there are new members of the crew.

3. Promote open communication in a team.

It is important to teach your staff to solve problems as a team, without your help. Open communication is an important and often overlooked element. Use time at your team’s meetings as a brainstorm opportunity – your staff should be able to solve existing problems or find jointly possible solutions.

4. Create procedures for dealing with typical situations.

Working time is valuable for you and your team, so don’t waste it on simple solution issues. The best way to gain a lot of time is to create procedures how to proceed with routine problems. You can instruct members of your team to create these procedures, as they are the ones who face these troubles every day at the reception desk. These procedures should be designed in such way that they improve the work of your team but not set new, hard to follow rules.

An extremely helpful set of hotel procedures can be found here >>>.

5. Control the progress of teamwork.

The last tip but not the least important is to control the teamwork. When the rules are clear and the team has set its goals, it is much easier for evaluation. It is important to review the progress and set corrective actions in case of absence of achieved results. It builds motivation of the whole team towards the goal and shows a good example for remaining departments of your property. 

Time to act!

It is only the first article in the series but it should give you solid foundations for making your front desk communicate better! The follow-up to my today`s publication will focus on the quality of your customer service. Click here to read it >>>

Anna Piątek