If you believe in the importance of ongoing and continuous training in your department or division, chances are that more than once in your career your superiors will challenge you and tell you that ‘training is a waste of time and money’, and a luxury that the hotel simply cannot afford at that time.
‘Excuse me… how could you say that?’
Reality is that training can be very expensive and a burden on your operations, if not executed effectively and if you don’t have a process in place of following up on the set expectations of the training. As a trainer it is your responsibility to show your organization the return on investment that it will have, and that you can measure it and how.
Having to convince your financial controller, you’ll need to be able to measure the improvement because of your training and show statistically how it will gain money for the hotel by having more happy employees who will attract more happy guests, who will spend more and stay more often (service profit chain) and not just lose money.
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Where to start? Well, first you should start by identifying where your company wants to get even better and where it needs to improve. Don’t design the training first and then try to push it through at any cost, but identify the necessary areas for improvement first and built the training on it.
Guide:
- Every hotel sends out guest surveys, receives scores and statistically measures the areas that you need to improve. Focus on training exactly these areas and measure the improvement since the implementation of it
- Most hotels have monthly or quarterly mystery shopper inspections that they hired an outside company for. Identify where you constantly fall short of expectations (like name usage), and built your training upon it
- Identify where your yearly associate satisfaction index needs improvement and incorporate it into your training, and you’ll be able to measure your success with the increased scores of next year’s survey
The value of training is very much a tangible one, and it’s your job as a passionate trainer to present it as such and make it happen even more in economical challenging times.
Question: How do you feel about training? is it money well spent?