Domestic bliss – how technology is transforming housekeeping

Housekeepers are the unsung heroes of hotel life. It’s not a glamorous gig, but behind the managers and receptionists lies an army of diligent men and women scrubbing, washing, hoovering and dusting. In carrying out their intensely physically demanding work, cleaners put themselves at risk from all sorts of repetitive motion injuries, back ailments and even potential illness from chemicals in cleaning products. It’s a tough job – many work for minimum wage and the profession has a notoriously high turnover rate – but someone’s got to do it.

Slowly but surely, however, technology could be making things easier, helping to simplify and streamline an often overwhelming task. Housekeeping is rooted in old-fashioned traditions of service and discretion. That’s not about to change anytime soon, but new ways of organising the workflow are profoundly affecting the sector, from the service itself to the staffing requirements.

Nights at the OPERA

Paul Berncastle has worked in the housekeeping business for over 20 years in hotels such as London’s Waldorf Hilton and Crowne Plaza – The City, and is now housekeeping manager at two major London properties as part of an outsourced contract. He’s seen it all and is refreshingly enthusiastic about just how quickly his job is evolving. 

“Each position has brought its own challenges, and a lot of it has been technology-based,” he says when asked how he’s seen the business change over the past two decades. “Housekeepers originally didn’t know how to use computers, so I got my very first computer in 1995, and taught myself everything I needed to know in order to be as effective and efficient as possible. Nowadays, you can use these systems for everything.”

Today, almost all housekeeping begins on a computer with a centralised database. The department can keep swathes of information about guest preferences, check-out times and room allocations in one place. Rooms can be assigned in sections, and any special requests – for anniversaries or birthdays, say – are logged and managed centrally. It’s a great way to create a personalised service and improve organisation at the same time.

The standard opinion of the whole world in terms of housekeeping in hotels is that the qualifications for cleaning a room have, in the past, been: two arms, two legs and a pulse.

“In the old days, we used to have to sit there and manually do lists,” says Liz Smith-Mills, housekeeping manager for QHotels and a founding member of the Yorkshire Housekeepers Association. “Obviously that saves considerable amount of time in the morning on allocating the rooms.

“At QHotels, we have all the arrivals, departures, stays… everything is on the computer, and you can access the full list of guests – if somebody specifically likes a certain room type, or they want a particular view or particular pillows, for example.”

Different hotels work with different software. The Hyatt Dubai, for example, uses the OPERA Reservation System, a program suite specially tailored for housekeeping management in the hospitality industry.

“It’s just such a time saver for each department – for the guest services, for the front desk, and for the coordinator who usually sits in housekeeping and has their hands full fielding all the telephone calls,” says Tanja Ahmed, who manages housekeeping at the Hyatt. “Our workload is cut down by almost 90%, and it’s much more user-friendly and accurate.”

In many instances, a critical job for the software is the allocation of rooms to clean – never an easy task to organise. Guests might not have checked out yet, might have specific needs and requirements, or might not necessarily want to be disturbed.

“For large hotels, it’s actually quite a big job for people to identify the quantity of rooms that need to be cleaned, by whom and when, to accommodate the guests,” says Berncastle. “So in that respect, to be able to fix telephones in each of the rooms and make the phone do the work for you, monitoring when guests check in or check out, is really helpful.

“When the guest checks out, the telephone will automatically identify that the room is vacant. So the technology is absolutely vital to ensure that the hotel is running as efficiently as it possibly can.”

 “There are numerous examples,” agrees Smith-Mills, “but what it effectively means is that we can actually cater to the guest’s needs, as we have all this previous guest history on record. It’s incredibly useful.”

Room to grow

All this doesn’t seem like a dramatic transformation for an industry that’s used to far greater shifts – the advent of the sharing economy and the rise of Airbnb spring to mind – but for a field that’s long depended on low-skilled, low-cost labour, it means hotels need to re-evaluate the way they hire cleaners and bear in mind the qualifications of prospective employees.

“The standard opinion of the whole world in terms of housekeeping in hotels is that the qualifications for cleaning a room have, in the past, been: two arms, two legs and a pulse,” says Berncastle. “If they’ve got the right kind of attitude, they can be trained to do anything.”

Now, prospective cleaners need to be IT literate – familiar with social media and the Microsoft Office package – and have transferable skills that mean they can easily pick up the complex software that’s being used to manage the day-to-day work.

“Fast forward to today, and they need so much more. I have got two arms and two legs, can breathe, have a brain, can speak English, can read English, can type English, am numerate and literate,” says Berncastle.

However, while the range of cleaners’ skills demanded by hotels has dramatically increased, the typical salary has not. On average, hotel cleaners earn £6.93 an hour in the UK, according to PayScale. This means that, despite the need for a much wider skill set, high turnover remains a problem, and cleaners often jump ship when better opportunities present themselves.

It’s hard to blame them, but the skills now required mean cleaners can become far more rounded employees and stick around for longer. Sreedhar Suresh, director of housekeeping at Shangri-La Barr Al Jissah in Oman, and an award-winning expert on the subject, tries to mitigate the churn by encouraging aspiration in his staff.

“We nurture ambition in their hearts and aim to offer advice to help them achieve it,” he says. “I love to create leaders. Many of my team members started as service associates and have been promoted to different positions – even housekeepers. It helps me to reduce turnover and maintains loyalty in my team. I invest in my staff and they, in turn, want to be invested in.”

Good housekeeping

Despite the dynamism of the hospitality sector, there are some things that surely never change, and one such constant is that hotel cleaners have to respect the guests and maintain their privacy at all times. So how can managers ensure that old-fashioned discretion is still valued?

“You have to nurture this at interview level,” says Berncastle. “You have to do that right from the infancy of the staff’s employment: you don’t steal, you don’t clock out early, you don’t arrive late – you go through the very basic stuff.”

There’s a good reason why this remains so important: cleaning staff are privy to some of the most intimate details of people’s lives on a day-to-day basis, allowed into places usually reserved only for a person’s nearest and dearest. This usually means that housekeepers are tougher than most hotel staff and have their fair share of war stories to share – most of which, naturally, can’t go on the record.

“If you can imagine it, it’s happened,” chuckles Berncastle. “Your idea of what some of these people get up to is limited by your imagination whereas I’ve had the pleasure of being executive housekeeper at the Waldorf for a few years…”

Speaking with housekeepers running busy teams across the UK, continental Europe and the Middle East, there’s a divergence of opinions in a lot of areas: from the extent to which automation can displace traditional service to the impact this has on training and the utility of centralised systems.

“Housekeeping literally covers the largest physical area of the hotel and generates the most revenue for it,” says Smith-Mills, “so it’s very important that housekeeping moves forward with the times and that it uses all the technology available to [give it] the best possible advantage.”

“We are all about personal touches and individual experiences,” insists Suresh, “so automation is really no issue for us, as this level of service could never become automated processes.”