Why do I have a hard time streamlining efficiency in my hotel?

Efficiency is the name of the game. Successful people are successful because they master efficiency. Business is thriving because they are saving cost by streamlining efficiency. It is well-known knowledge.

Then, by logic, streamlining efficiency should be approachable in any workplace, hotel included. How wrong I was walking into this new industry with such thoughts.

Flashback time: I grew up in an industrial family. My parents and other close relatives were all working in factories. They are efficient maniacs, in a sense. That rubs off on me quite a bit. I put many theories and philosophies from Japanese to American, pretty much anything that can be pulled from a book, into my work environment. Some moderate success came out of that too, which strengthened my confidence quite a bit. 

So what changed?

Hospitality is a very flexible industry in every sense of the word. Precisely the intangible qualities in our services and the high workforce turnover. 

The turnover rate in the hotel industry, in particular, is crazy. Many positions in the hotel chain have turnover time as low as six months. The high turnover rate is not limited to lower positions but also to managers and executive roles. This, in turn, creates many unstable variables that disrupt the sustainability and systematic elements of the organization. People change leads to perspective changes, goals changes, and so do agendas.

Constantly losing skilled employees and training new ones can put a lot of strain on the limited and most valuable resource: TIME. Of course, there are many reasons for time to be affected, which leads to inefficiency. The turnover rate of the workforce is just one of them. The most common secondary inefficient outcome of this is the habit of reverting back to a weak system and bad working mentality: Don’t fix what is not broken - kind of deal. Instability among the team, especially with the team members themselves, wreaks havoc on the plan’s details and goals.

The American culture of achieving profitability quarter by quarter also fundamentally bothers me. If not careful, this mentality can encourage cutting corners and generate mistakes that would be costly down the line. Top this term-by-term system of employees and executives alike, and they are a bad combo.

The burning questions now are: How can I fix or overcome these limitations? How can we make these problems more predictable? Reducing the effect it has on the organization. How do we protect the downside? How do we align short-term goals with more extended plans down the road?

I know how this looks. It is more of a web of endless mess than a bang. But that is the thing: the job is like a sandbox with endless possibilities. Untangling the knots, putting lines in patterns, creating order, and modifying this web to get higher-quality results. As for why streamlining efficiency is hard? I have some ideas now, and let the Untangling begin.