HSMAI Foundation Talent Best Practice

As hospitality organizations, our team members’ voices are important. Their level of engagement affects their service delivery and directly impacts our guests’ satisfaction. We solicit our team members for feedback in their self-evaluations, team member satisfaction surveys, annual reviews, quarterly development lunches, random one-on-ones, and several team member engagement activities. With all these activities, do we do an adequate job providing our team members with the tools to articulate how they contribute to the organization’s culture and success? StrengthsFinder (now called CliftonStrengths 34) is an assessment tool designed to showcase a person’s top strengths and what that means for them as an individual. The assessment has been taken by more than 25 million people worldwide. I am privileged to work for an organization that has a dedicated StrengthsFinder coach on property. We leverage this expertise in a variety of ways including our internship program, mentoring program, and personal development courses. It has made a dramatic difference in my perspective and how I lead, daily, as a Director of Resorts Marketing. Before we start on this journey, I want to share my definition of what StrengthsFinder is vs. what it is not: What It Is:  A tool to help gain greater insight for self-awareness. There are 34 strengths that can be identified by...

Incentivizing Today’s Sales Team

We have all discussed the need for recruiting, retention, career development, breaking down the silos, and keeping teams motivated while avoiding burnout. Compensation is just one critical piece of the puzzle. Recently the Sales Advisory Board got together to discuss the evolution of incentives for sales teams while driving desired results and keeping teams motivated. The jury is still out... The jury is still out on the best model of incentives, individual or team-based. However, the advisory board agreed that their incentive models have changed since the pandemic’s start. Several advisory board members are using a combination of group incentives and individual performance, while others have done away with individual incentives and are 100% team-based. In the past year, some have moved from team-based incentives during the pandemic and switched back to individual incentives. Many began to look at incentives holistically and increased bonuses to make it more competitive. Locations of the hotels also played a role in the incentive models used. Many advisory board members are looking to 2023 for the industry to stabilize and bring the sales objective back to 2019 levels, especially as hotels in city centers have been lagging the recovery curve when compared to resort destinations.  All...

The Budget Process – What Do We Do Differently?

Last month the Revenue Optimization Advisory Board met for a discussion of the budget process. A timely topic, as many companies are in the midst of developing budgets and preparing for 2023. I posed the question, is budgeting a waste of time when it is rarely accurate anyways?  Especially in the current environment of pandemic recovery, inflation and recession rumors, there are so many unknowns that make budgeting akin to throwing a dart at the wall. What is the point of taking hours, weeks and even months away from doing real strategy and optimization to put numbers together for a budget?    If your budget relies on historical data, what data do you use? Are we still looking at 2019 that is no longer valid for trend comparison? If we cannot use the past, and if future projections are unreliable (as we have seen from the last few years of wildly inaccurate industry forecasts), what do we use for budgets to simplify the process?  Why do we still develop budgets?  Advisory Board members agreed they must prepare budgets for financial requirements. They also discussed the need for targets. There was an interest in using more real-time data to understand trends and build strategies....