It costs how much to hire someone??!!
This is going to come as a shock to some of you, but to bring on a new team member can be twenty to thirty percent of that salary.
Let’s say that person’s making $40,000 a year, it can cost you $8,000 to bring on that team member, and that’s just recruiting costs and trying to get them trained up.
I mean, it’s going to take them another six to nine months to really understand and get a great ability to perform that job in an excellent format, in an excellent way.
So, what do we do as people in the hotel industry, where there is typically really high turnover at hotels, to keep this cost at low as possible?
I mean, heck, at those particular rates, even a housekeeper is going to cost you $3,800, $4,000. That’s a lot of money!
So, what do we do?
One easy step that we can do as managers and leaders is to go ahead and invest in our team. And this doesn’t necessarily have to be a financial investment, but an emotional one, a relational one.
One of the best ways to do this is when you’re out there with your hotel, when you’re visiting hotels, when you’re with your GM, when you’re calling hotels to check in on things: Instead of saying, “hey, how was your weekend?”, since most people just say, “it was good,” or, “yeah, went and did this with the family.” and it’s super [non-] specific!
Go along and open up a conversation!
Go with the line of, “so, tell me about your weekend!" What this does is opens up a story. It allows that team member the opportunity to speak about all the things that they were able to do with their family and all the things that they learned at the hotel if they were working that weekend. If they respond with, “oh, I was working that weekend," respond with, “well, tell me about the front desk stuff, tell me about the guests. Was there an interesting guest you got to check in? Was there a platinum member and they were just super thrilled and super thankful for the time to stay at your hotel?”
The “tell me more” line allows you to open up a conversation and that’s what people want. People want to talk about themselves, they want to talk about their strengths, they want to talk about what interests them. And what this does is builds rapport, it builds trust, it builds that relationship. When you have that strong relationship with your team, you don’t have that turnover. You’re able to develop and build an exceptional hotel team, operations team, and even a great accounting team, when you build that trust just through using the simple words: “Tell me more”.
Today’s simple tip: begin using these three words “tell me more" in your conversations.
This way you can build lasting and strong relationships, creating more trust and rapport so that you don’t have to deal with the high cost of employee turnover!
