Learn how to set achievable goals for housekeeping staff with Polo & Tweed's 'SMART' approach for improved efficiency while boosting moral in your housekeeping team. Share on XDo you struggle to get your housekeeping staff to be more effective in their work, or notice tasks are forgotten or dropped? Are you setting goals for your Housekeeping staff?
Setting goals for housekeeping staff is of the utmost importance for a smooth workflow that will keep housekeepers on track and focused. When you have a housekeeping team that has to repeatedly do the same tasks for a long time, they get stuck in a routine. Motivate your housekeeping staff by setting goals so they can focus on something new.
If you set clear goals for your housekeeping staff, it will give them a new sense of structure to tackle problems. You’ll find the team works more efficiently. The quality of their work improves. And they better job satisfaction, too. After all, a happy team is a great team that will last!
How To Set Goals To Improve Work Quality
A great way you can implement a system of goal setting is to use the ‘SMART’ system. This stands for:
Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Relevant
Time-Based
A lot of information is in these five words already. First of all, when you are setting goals for your housekeeping team, be specific. If your instructions are too generic, like simply saying, ‘work faster’. Your staff may not understand how to achieve that goal and ask: ‘how fast is faster?’. It’s much more productive if you phrase this specifically by saying something like this. ‘Try and finish the bathroom cleaning in 1 hour instead of 2 hours’.
This way you are being clear, specific, and you’ll avoid confusion among your housekeeping staff.
Let’s use this example for the other four SMART words.
Measurable:
By giving your staff a clear timeline, the 1-hour slot. Your staff can instantly measure if they successfully achieve their goal. In our work, we all need some sort of measure of success. So having that clear 1-hour slot for them to count can help them see whether they’re achieving the goal.
Attainable:
Is 1 hour realistic? We’ve just used this number in this article as an example. But you’ll have to make sure that whatever goal you set is attainable and achievable. You cannot ask for the impossible. If you know that cleaning the bathroom takes more than an hour. Then assigning them an unrealistic goal to finish the job in an hour will only be counterproductive. It’ll demoralise housekeeping staff. And they won’t be motivated.
Relevant:
The time taken to clean a bathroom is highly relevant to housekeeping staff and their day-to-day job. So this goal can be important in making improvements. What you don’t want to do is to set goals with too few details, or assign goals that aren’t at all relevant to your housekeeping team.
Time-Based:
Our bathroom cleaning example is perfect in this way as it gives a clear indication of time-based management for the housekeeping team. Staff that is given time-based goals are given something to aim for with a target deadline.
How can Polo & Tweed Housekeeping Training Help?
The Polo & Tweed Housekeeping training is much more than learning how to clean and all the housekeeping techniques. It is definitely a significant part of the training. But many of the housekeeping training modules focus on precisely how to be more efficient and structured. As well as how to achieve set goals.
Even after reading this article, you might struggle to come up with suitable goals to set for your team, or maybe you are unsure of how to implement those goals. Our Housekeeping trainers offer Observation Days, for which a trainer shadows housekeeping staff for a set period of time while on the job at your house, hotel, or establishment. After the visit, a detailed feedback document and proposal will be created; listing the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in your current set up and organization, as well as advice on how training can improve this. You’ll be given a detailed training plan with custom-made training solutions, which can include goal setting, and how to manage and implement the goals.
Observation days allow you to not worry about what is wrong. The trainers will do all the analyzing for you! You also won’t have to worry about the training aspect as this will all be set up for you. The trainer will be there to guide you on implementing new goals, structures, and plans for your housekeeping team so they can grow and become more efficient for your household, hotel or establishment to flourish.
Get in touch with our training team here to discuss our housekeeping job training options.
We look forward to help you set effective goals for your housekeeping staff soon!