How many meetings do you have per day? If you are a department manager, you will most likely start with your department's morning briefing, then head to the GM's office around 9:30 for the daily Heads of Department meeting. In the afternoon, there will be another one, perhaps for an event, a VIP arrival or a special project. That is already three meetings a day. At roughly 40 minutes each, that adds up to 120 minutes: two hours of your eight-hour working day spent in meetings.
If you are lucky enough to work for many years with the same General Manager, rather than changing GMs every year or so (which happens often in the hotel business), meetings should normally stay at a reasonable level. And if the Heads of Department have been with the hotel long enough to know the ups and downs of the business throughout the year, things get even easier. In my experience, the longer the HODs and the GM have worked together, the fewer meetings are needed. Of course, if something extraordinary happens at the property, such as a full-scale renovation, more meetings may be required.
On the other hand, if you have a GM who has just arrived, is trying to get things under control and calls a meeting for even minor issues, prepare yourself for plenty of meetings. That lasts until occupancy picks up, and then everybody understands that meetings should be kept to a minimum so the HODs can get on with running their departments.
So where is the balance? In my experience, you need three things.
First, a quick morning briefing with your department supervisors.
Second, a daily HOD meeting with the GM from 10:00 to 10:40, or every other day depending on business trends and room occupancy.
Third, as Housekeeping Manager, you definitely need a weekly meeting and walkthrough with the GM on a fixed day and at a fixed time, for example every Wednesday or Thursday at 16:00.
Most GMs will try to skip this and run random room checks. Explain that this will not pinpoint all the areas they need to see in Housekeeping. Also explain that the points you are showing or discussing come from your notes and observations gathered during many walkthroughs of the property, as well as setbacks and incidents during the operation. These are things the GM will completely miss if they choose the “hawk approach”: just check a room, write an email with remarks and think that the job is done, until a major room issue happens and they have no idea about it because they did not give the Housekeeping Manager the opportunity to report and explain it properly.
Now, concerning internal department meetings, I have found from my experience that having clear task allocation lists for each job position prepared the day before can reduce meeting time by 50–60%. Everybody is tuned in as soon as they start their shift, without having to wait for the Executive Housekeeper to organise a meeting, call everybody together, etc.
Of course, on certain occasions, you might not be able to avoid a briefing if there are special issues to discuss.
If you need some more information on this, check out Product 07 — Allocating Tasks to Your Personnel. It deals with exactly this: clear task allocation to reduce briefing time. Download the ready-made forms, adjust them to your property and use them for your next shift.
📂 Browse the Full HMTS Product Library
All tools are available in the HMTS Product Directory.
© All rights reserved. Hotel Casino HSKP Management Training Store (HMTS). No part of this content may be reproduced or distributed without written permission.
0 comments