Summer is right around the corner. Schools are getting close to closing for the summer. The in-city college is about to have graduation. Business has been growing as we exit the slow season and as early as mid-last month we’ve been selling far more rooms.
We are a hotel. Hundreds of people will stay the night each night starting this month and won’t let up until late September.
I run the maintenance department. I have one employee that’s full-time in my department. I have a second employee who works half their shifts at the front desk and the other half in maintenance. Two people per day work the maintenance department. Not two people besides myself. Two people including myself.
Front desk has 5 people devoted to Front Desk. 2 are strictly night audit, 1 is strictly evening shift, 1 is daytime and 1 works three shifts in the evening and 2 in the morning. One of these girls is currently on day 8 of 9 and on day 6 she had to work 2 8 hour shifts back to back. So 10 full shifts, because they messed up scheduling.
Housekeeping has 12 employees. A fair numbers, but 5 are strictly laundry, 5 are strictly room cleaning and 2 are management. The room cleaners are assigned 18 rooms a day and only 6 hours to complete them all. 1 of the laundry people is only on-call and half the time she won’t answer her phone. 1 of them has mobility issues and is pretty slow. The head-housekeeper sometimes is unable to leave before she’s worked over 50 hours because some of the housekeepers will be slow enough that they’ll be here up to 9 hours cleaning rooms.
Breakfast has 3 attendants. Only 2 works during the week and the other two are weekend and they are also laundry attendants.
One might assume that they’d just hire more people. Such as my department. It’s the start of summer basically, surely we’d hire more people because it’s needed. Nope. Even though my one full time maintenance person calls out pretty regularly and when he’s here half the stuff doesn’t get done. Or, maybe we would hire maybe an additional front desk agent so that our one girl isn’t working so much (it’s actually a common occurrence they make her work double shifts only to have her come back 8 hours later for another full shift). Nope.
Corporate has told our hotel’s GM that in-fact, each department is being given way too many hours and we need to cut back on hours. That’s right, we are short-staffed and yet somehow, we have too many hours being handed out.
Being on the other side, I know that there are bonuses involved for not filling out all the hours that are needed. Let the hotel suffer, as it’s better to get those sweet bonuses. Bonuses, mind you, that the department heads will never see.