Key steps to building a high-impact training program for hotel staff

By Tanya Galton

The front-line employees of a hotel are the first point of contact for the guests. They represent the hotel brand, and in many ways, the very first impression about your hotel or chain that your guests get depends on your line staff.

Major psychology researches confirm that the first impression is the most important one for any business and is very hard to override. Imagine how much depends on the quality of training your line personnel receives: your hotel brand’s reputation, your customer loyalty and your operational efficiency.

Organizing continuous, effective training for your line staff in an often hectic, pressured, specifics-dependent and fluid environment such as a hotel is not easy. Especially when to achieve impeccable training, you need to deliver it at scale, but with a highly personal touch.

The use of a learning management system (LMS) can lighten the load of this very serious task. In this article, we will talk about how to effectively train hotel personnel to benefit their growth, your business and your customer satisfaction.

Step 1: Understand your target audience

A hotel is often a melting pot of people, and this is true not just about customers, but employees as well. It could be college students working at your front desk; sophisticated chefs and maître d’s; busboys and valets, who can be school kids; and immigrants working in housekeeping and the kitchen. In short, people who are coming from all walks of life.

All of them may have varying life paces, learning habits and experience backgrounds. However, there are still similarities that the very work at a hotel imposes on how they will want to learn. In most hotels today, the work is influenced by high and low seasons, and there’s always a need for rapid onboarding.

This means that for your audiences, onboarding training needs to be intense and cover bare necessities to start out effectively, while being packed in a few days. All of your training needs to consider the fast-paced, stressful environment and shift-based work. They should also be language-friendly for your international staff, phone-accessible and interactive to cater to their stimuli-dependent content consumption.

Step 2. Identify the training scope

This is where, despite having many similar qualities, your training may get very diverse in terms of subject matter, delivery and access level.

Identify core competencies for each role
This means you need to create a list of skills an employee should have for each role and set priorities for each. Core skills should become the focus of your essential training, onboarding and staff selection procedures.

Identify skills that can boost each role
This is a tricky part, but if you are successful, it can help you reap major benefits. Here’s an example: a country club with yearly membership costs of more than $50,000 a year trained its front desk staff to know the names and consumer habits of all of its 200-plus members and their often-visiting friends and family members so that they can address them by name at all times and make their communication more personalized.

In the end-of-season customer satisfaction survey, customers reported that the quality of communication with the front-desk staff had greatly improved. There was also an increase in reservations, and the country club hotel, restaurant and golf facilities were used more often for family functions for its members’ families.

Step 3. Develop tailored learning content

Your learning path for each role should include both essential skill learning and advanced specifics that help boost your workers’ effectiveness. It also has to be aligned with your hotel business scenarios and with your particular employee group’s learning habits.

Split all learning content by role and by purpose.

At the end of this process, you should have a number of courses that fit a particular set of roles and purposes. For example, a Caribbean hotel develops a course on housekeeping standards for line staff and adapts it for management. The course also gets translated into several languages such as English, Spanish and French to cover international teams. For housekeeping staff, the course is mandatory; for managers. it’s more of a FYI material.

Use a scenario-based approach
This type of content organization is perfect for hospitality because it emulates real-life situations that your line staff deals with on a daily basis and shows them how to handle them. It suggests a good degree of interactivity to keep their attention and helps them relate better. Example: a course that walks your front-desk personnel through a high-stress situation, like overbooking.

Leverage eLearning tools such as an LMS
If you are targeting very varied learners with the same information, you need to deliver it differently, quickly and constantly adapt. The use of LMS allows you to treat your course creation process like Legos. You break it down into small pieces of learning and quickly compose courses, designing them to fit a particular group of people.

For example, a hotel chain with premises in various landmark markets scaled its new post-COVID health safety training. It had seasoned team members working in the same places for decades, as well as a much younger crowd of seasonal workers. Using an LMS, it managed to quickly create several variants of the same course that fit the learning habits of very different groups.

Step 4: Implement a blended learning approach

Working in a hotel implies a lot of personal interaction with customers. The use of LMS can offer a great theoretical base and help you to scale it quickly and effortlessly to all of your workers. It can also help you to create scenario-based courses. This is the type of skills and knowledge our workers can practice in actual work situations or offline workshops. While shifting your corporate training online is a developmental step for your business, statistics show that almost half of hospitality employees express the desire for face-to-face training as well.

For example: A hotel located in a famous vacation hotspot with a lot of international tourists creates a course on cultural sensitivity. It has a theory part which employees can access through an app on their mobile phones and then it is followed by a team-building activity where the new knowledge can be used in practice.

Step 5. Monitor, evaluate, reiterate

Set clear KPIs
Working with KPIs in hospitality can be complicated. With high turnover and low motivation, employees may sabotage or even attempt to cheat, sharing quiz results or passing qualifications for one another. It is more effective not to make the actual completion of training a KPI, but rather work with what aspects of work it should improve.

Feedback loops
When working with such a diverse crowd of learners as the one in a hotel business, feedback is key. It will allow you to look at your training from a number of angles you’ve probably not even considered. It will also help you evaluate how responsive your learners are to the training to tweak course material and delivery quickly.

Create and offer learning paths
The use of an LMS can make the creation of personalized learning paths easy and smooth. High employee turnover rates in hospitality are the single-most-cited HR problem and, according to statistics, more than 70% of employees state that learning on the job gives them a sense of purpose and improves their connection to the employer. This, in turn, can improve your employee retention. The learning itself is much more effective when your learners have a clear purpose in sight.

Conclusion

Following high customer care standards and offering excellent service is what can set your hotel apart and make your guests come back for more visits. In an often chaotic, stressful, high-turnover environment like hospitality, only an effective personnel training system can ensure that your staff has all the skills and knowledge necessary for that. When you built this system on the backbone of a trustworthy LMS, you empower your staff with innovative instruments for learning. And following the steps described above will help you to create a fail-proof learning strategy for the line personnel of your hotel.

Tanya Galton is the director of iSpring Academy, an eLearning software company based in Alexandria, VA.