TL, DR; Corporate brought in a manager to fix our hotel, and in the attempt to 'fix' it, drove off everyone who had been there including the housekeeping manager of 19 years.
I got a job at a hotel with my friend a few months ago and the hotel immediately destroyed itself in the most spectacular way I've seen at a business.
We had a dedicated team of hard-working people who had been there for mostly years. I applied, got the job as a room attendant and started training. About my third week in, management changes. Apparently corporate had problems with management and sacked them. (To be fair, I heard stories from my friend about how the manager was a niceguys creep to all the young women the hotel would hire, so good for them getting rid of him!) Jay, let's call him, was replaced by a 'fixer'. A corporate management person who goes from hotel to hotel around the country fixing problems. In this case, I assumed “fixing” to be “bringing in line with corporate”.
The job is hard, like any minimum wage hotel job would be but we had some shining light in the darkness. Mostly it was Hannah, our housekeeping supervisor and room checker. She's a shining golden orb of happiness in a room of dour depression. She had nothing but nice things to say. She was polite when correcting and fun to be around. I felt great being led by her.
Well, Jay is fired. But thankfully for him, there's a new hotel chain owned by a famous rockstar opening up in our town, and it's got everyone excited. It's a big coming attraction. Really, all it is, is a hotel with a built in bar. Wow. Such innovation. Anyway, Jay went to them and easily got hired after he was let go as a manager for this new hotel. And because Jay had been there for so long, he had developed good friendships with most of the employees at my hotel. He was more like their big brother or friend than boss, from what I've heard. Well, it didn't take long for Jay to contact our hotel, and let people unhappy with management know that he would guarantee them a job if they asked.
So week five, I go in with my friend for our morning meeting and the Fixer tells us that we lost three of our housekeepers, our maintenance person, and our laundry person. Suddenly, a relatively predictable routine became a chaotic nightmare. The housekeeping managers started being stretched to their utter limits, coming in every single day for weeks on end. We lost another housekeeper when one of the girls went to laundry to makeup for the manpower shortage. We were robbing our own staff of resources just to get by at this point. These three weeks after we lost all those people felt like the worst crucible I've ever been through at work. I was always tired. I came in on most of my days off. I would do 12 – 25 rooms a day. I'm not old, but I'm no machine. The work started to wear on me and my friend. But we both said, 'we'll just stay a little longer and it'll get better!'
Slowly we watched new faces come for a few days, realize housekeeping is one of the worst jobs you could seek, and leave. We got one or two new people who stayed throughout the proceeding two months. Attrition was starting to lose, and we felt that maybe, just maybe, we were turning the corner.
Then came Friday. My friend had work that day, and I didn't, and they texted me to tell me that Hannah had been fired. As the day went on, we found out that multiple people were disgusted over how she had been fired and why, and quit in solidarity. We lost the fill-in laundry person, because she quit. The entire housekeeping staff except for two people quit. Maintenance quit. Shuttle driver, quit. And of course, seeing this mass exodus I had to ask what was happening.
Well. Apparently the fixer is a bitch. I can attest to this, she's snobby and has a 'tude for days. I only have to tolerate it during meetings, but Hannah was tired of dealing with it and went to the other housekeeping manager to vent. Unfortunately, that housekeeping manager went to HR, and HR began doing investigations of…the house keepers and supervisors, not the fixer! Eventually their 'investigation' cleared the manager, but housekeeping and the supervisor were thrown under the bus. Bitter recrimination between the two HK supervisors ensued, and it escalated until Hannah left. When Hannah left, everyone who thought it was bullshit left, and I left too, not wanting to be left holding the bag after this disaster.
I sit at my house right now, wondering what's going on in that hellhole I left behind. Next to no housekeepers, no laundry person, no maintenance person. But hey, at least corporate's fixer got to fix the hotel. Right?