Month: February 2019

technology for hotel managers

The Digital Tools Every Hotel Manager Needs

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While the key to success in the hotel industry will always be good, old-fashioned hospitality, leveraging the right hotel technology makes it easier to meet and exceed guest expectations. From pre-booking to checkout, using digital tools will help your hotel run smoothly, offering guests an experience they will come to enjoy and trust. So what are these tools? Here’s the hotel technology you need to attract guests and manage hotel operations better.

Digital Tools for Hotel Managers

1. Property Management Systems

A hotel property management system (PMS) is the lifeblood of operations. It’s where all front-office capabilities come together on a single platform. A good PMS combines tasks such as guest check-in/check-out, managing room rates, billing, booking reservations, and room assignments. This hotel technology is an absolute must-have; you really can’t operate a hotel these days without a good PMS.

Popular PMS platforms include:

2. Revenue Management

Success in any industry in today’s business environment is all about data. To collect the right information so you can provide the right price to the right customer at the right time, you need a revenue management system. This software helps you make the right decisions by automating the process of collecting and analyzing data.

3. Pantry Management Software

Food and beverage trends in hospitality require a keen understanding of your guests, which means vending machines are no longer the go-to option for providing them with snacks and beverages. They want more items with easier access and a hotel pantry is just the ticket.

But managing a pantry can be challenging. After all, it’s a retail operation and you’re a hospitality professional. Hotel technology like Supply Wizards makes it simple. Order all your items–snacks, beverages, sundries–from an easy-to-use online platform and get delivery within 1-2 days.

4. Marketing Tools

If your hotel doesn’t have a strong online presence, how will guests find it? Digital marketing is an absolute must. Here’s what you need to effectively market your hotel.

  • A well-designed website
  • Google Analytics
  • Social Media Management Tool
team members high five each other for motivation

10 Ways to Keep Your Team Motivated

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Whether you manage a small office with a handful of people or a large team in a corporate setting, keeping your team motivated is essential to success and overall happiness. Motivated employees have a better outlook, are more productive, and are generally happier.

But even the biggest go-getters come across the occasional lull. As a manager, part of your responsibility is to keep your team motivated and eager to do their best all the time. That’s no easy task, so we’ve compiled a list of ten areas to focus on to help give your team a little extra drive.

10 Ways to Motivate Your Team to be More Productive & Happier

1. Pay Them What They’re Worth

You don’t want to lose a great employee because they’re not paid enough. Make sure their salaries are consistent with their productivity. You also want to keep their pay in line with what other companies in your industry are paying to prevent them from jumping ship for higher pay.

2. Improve the Company Culture

In a study published in the Harvard Business Review, a company’s culture plays an important role in how motivated employees are. The research focused on three areas:

  • How culture affects performance
  • The worth of culture to an organization
  • The processes that influence culture

The key findings? Performance is largely tied to why we work. There are better customer outcomes when a culture fosters certain characteristics such as more play, potential, and purpose. As for certain processes that impact a company’s culture, it varies and how the role is designed can have a big affect.

A company’s culture directly impacts employees perspective on work. Make sure your organization is actively pursuing a culture that inherently motivates employees.

3. Recognize Success (For the Whole Team)

As a manager, taking time to celebrate achievements should be a priority. Recognizing success can be a powerful motivator as it fosters a sense of fulfillment for employees in their careers. It adds to their sense of purpose. Do this both on an individual level and for the whole team. Encourage team members to recognize achievements among each other.

4. Keep Them Fueled

The infamous mid-afternoon slump can wipe out all the motivation in even the most determined employees. Help them maintain momentum to power through the day with the right snacks and beverages. A quality snack delivery service will do the trick without impacting your overall productivity.

5. Help Them Reach Their Full Potential

Leading a team is about more than just balancing workloads among each member. A good manager helps employees develop themselves professionally. Understanding their strengths and weaknesses becomes critical. Challenge them to go further in areas in which you know they struggle.

6. Provide the Right Tools

One major frustration that can deteriorate any team’s motivation at work is being asked to complete tasks without the proper tools available. It can wear employees down. For example, in today’s workplace, there are endless digital tools available to help manage and complete work. Make them available so your team can be more productive.

7. Ask Questions, Don’t Just Give Answers

One of the main factors of having a sense of purpose is finding solutions on your own. Instead of laying out the path to solving problems for them, ask questions that will energize them to figure out the solution by themselves. Nobody likes to be told exactly how to do their job.

8. Show Them How & Why Their Work Matters

When employees fail to see how their work impacts the big picture within an organization, engagement and productivity begin to decline. When leading a team, remember to always include them or their work in the company’s broader strategy.

9. Offer Opportunity for Growth

Not providing pathways to more opportunities leads to complacency, which will only breed unmotivated employees. Offer plenty of opportunities for your team members to grow where they can eventually take on new and bigger challenges.

10. Have Fun Together

People that get along well with one another also work well together. Help your team foster good relations among each other through team building exercises or something as simple as regular lunch meetings together.

How Your Office Break Room Can Be A Source Of Insipiration

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As the workplace continues to evolve in so many ways and so quickly it can seem difficult to keep up. Cultural and operational changes in recent years make the modern office hardly recognizable from its not-so-distant past. This includes the office break room. The days of boring wall art and clunky vending machines that might or might not steal your money are over. Your company break room can now be a source of inspiration. Here’s how:

Keep Employees Energized

Employees often use office break rooms to eat, whether it’s for lunch or a quick snack. (Shocking, we know.) But in all seriousness, the foundation of the modern break room rests on the ability to provide employees with a broader range of food and beverage products, which includes healthy snacks. Food that truly gives them energy versus a quick sugar rush only to be followed by a hard faceplant into the keyboard. Snack delivery services make this easily attainable.

Maintain Positive Levels of Morale

There are many elements that factor into improving morale in the workplace, but chief among them is sharing a sense of higher purpose with fellow colleagues. A welcoming and engaging office break room is the perfect place for employees to mix and mingle and share their enthusiasm for working towards a common goal.

Bold Design & Artwork

Have you ever been inspired by dull, neutral colors? What about those framed posters of mountains with the word “Inspiration” printed on the bottom? A bold approach to your break room design can have a positive impact on employees. Unique artwork often conjures up a sense of curiosity, while the right colors generate a feeling of enthusiasm.

Fosters Collaboration

Your office break room has a seemingly uncanny ability to bring people together. A common place where all employees are welcome–and actually like to be–can foster inter-departmental relationships, which may lead to stronger collaborative efforts among your employees.

As about one-third of our time is spent at work, we owe it to ourselves to have offices with comfortable spaces such as break rooms that not only provide a place to relax but offer a sense of inspiration.

email inbox overload interruption concept

3 Biggest Interruptions for Office Managers and How to Manage Them

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You got a minute?

As an office manager, you’re probably interrupted at work by that question more than you can count. Whether it’s an executive or employee you manage, there’s always someone who needs help.

Add to that the barrage of emails and messages from team collaboration tools and it’s a wonder how you’re able to get any work done.

Your workday becomes a constant battle of fighting interruptions and distractions to accomplish tasks.

Aside from staying late or getting to the office early, there’s got a be a way to minimize interruptions so you can focus. Rescue Time, a time management software product, has a great blog post about just that. You can read the whole post here, but here are the main points:

  1. Awareness
  2. Schedule interruptions
  3. Rethink how you communicate

Here are the most common workplace distractions for office managers and how to deal with them.

1. In-Person Interruptions

By far the most common, in-person interruptions are especially challenging to manage because, well, they’re right there in your face. You can’t just walk away. To deal with these distractions, schedule ‘available’ and ‘unavailable’ time. Just be mindful that, as a manager, it’s your job to help employees when needed.

2. Emails

How many emails do you receive in a day? Dozens? Hundreds? Whatever the amount, emails account for another big portion of workplace interruptions and your productivity takes a hit with each message. Here’s how to manage email interruptions:

  • Schedule times throughout the day to review emails
  • Turn off notifications
  • Only respond immediately if absolutely necessary
  • Get rid of irrelevant messages

3. Collaboration Tools

There are so many digital tools for managers out there designed to improve productivity. But sometimes they can become quite an interruption themselves. Be sure to set guidelines with your team about how and when to contact you through your collaboration program.