Hotel digital transformation

If you’ve ever worked in hospitality, you’ll know nothing is ever simple. There are competing priorities across departments and personalities with a constant stream of customers, 7-days a week.

I was working in the accounts department across a small group of four hotels, with around 250 staff. One challenge kept coming up: tracking people’s time and attendance. It wasn’t just an accounts problem, it was a problem for everyone from employees to management to senior leadership.

Staff clocked in using an old swipe card machine, holiday requests were handled on paper and rotas lived in the office. Payroll data had to be pulled manually from a system that sat on its own remote server. Nothing really joined up.

I was working in the centralised accounts department and from our perspective, it was messy. People would ask whether something had been included in payroll, but the answer often depended on whether a paper form had been filled in, signed off, passed across and processed properly.

It caused problems throughout the whole business.

Employees had poor visibility over their shifts and holiday balances. Managers had limited control over staffing, holiday approvals and rota changes. Accounts had to piece together payroll from disconnected information. Senior leadership had limited visibility over wage expenditure across departments.

The old system worked, but only just. It relied too heavily on people remembering to do the right thing, in the right order, at the right time.

I started by working out what problem we were actually trying to solve.

It would have been easy to say, “we need a better clocking-in system”, but that wasn’t enough. The real problem was the flow of information between employees, managers, accounts and senior leadership.

So I mapped the pain points for each group.

Employees needed easier access to shifts, holidays and balances. Managers needed better control over rotas, holiday approvals and staffing cover. Accounts needed cleaner payroll data and better reporting. Senior leadership needed a clear business case and confidence that the investment would improve control, not just add another system.

Once I understood the problem, I researched the available options and produced a business case for senior leadership. I presented the different routes we could take, the benefits of each and the impact the right system could have across the group.

After approval, I led the implementation of a cloud-based time and attendance system across the group This included the setup, rollout, training, support and documentation. I created guidance for each level of user, from employees through to managers and accounts. What to do, how to use it, FAQs and who owns each part of the process.

The technical setup mattered, but the harder part was adoption.

People had different levels of confidence, different working patterns and different reasons to care. Kitchen teams, front of house, housekeeping, managers and accounts all interacted with the system differently.

Unfortunately you can’t just tell people to use a new system and expect it to work. I had to understand how they worked, identify what behaviour needs to change and ultimately find what’s in it for them.

The new system gave everyone better visibility.

Employees could see their shifts, request holidays and check their live holiday balance through the app. They no longer had to rely on paper rotas in the office or ask a manager how much holiday they had left.

Managers could see holiday requests, staffing levels and rota changes in one place. That reduced the chance of approving holiday without realising too many people were already off. It gave them better control over the day-to-day operation of the hotels.

Accounts had cleaner data and more confidence when processing payroll. Instead of pulling information from disconnected systems and chasing paper forms, the key information was held in one joined-up process.

The bigger commercial benefit was wage control. The system made it possible to report wage percentages across departments and compare them against revenue generated in those areas of the business. That gave management a level of visibility they did not have before.

The system was implemented in around three months, with a further three months of support, training and hand-holding to fully embed it across the group.

The biggest result was that the transformation worked for every stakeholder.

Employees got convenience. Managers got control. Accounts got accuracy. Senior leadership got visibility.