Managing to Make a Difference

Chapter 23Resist the Temptation to Seize Control

In the luxury hotel business, labor is the biggest controllable cost, and managers are directly responsible for it. Getting the work schedule right is important and challenging. Schedule too many employees and your payroll is too high. Schedule too few employees and the quality of service suffers. Here is a story about an all-too-common response managers make when things go awry in important areas of the business, like scheduling:

The Botched Schedule

A hotel restaurant manager really botched the employee schedule, resulting in a lot of service defects, upset guests, upset employees, and unnecessary costs (due to rework and service recovery). The general manager chewed out the food and beverage director who in turn chewed out the restaurant manager. Also, to prevent that from happening again, the food and beverage director declared that henceforth he would review all schedules from all food and beverage departments before they became final.

Have you witnessed this type of over-response before? This solution created a lot of extra work for the food and beverage director. He did not start reviewing schedules made by just that single restaurant manager. He started doing it for all the managers of all the food and beverage outlets in the hotel. It slowed things down considerably, and it sent a clear message that the department heads were no longer trusted to make proper schedules. They were closest to the needs of the business, ...