It's no secret that this has been one of the most challenging periods in the history of the hospitality industry. With forced closures and business travel being nearly non-existent due to the COVID-19 pandemic, hospitality professionals have had to make massive adjustments in their jobs and in their lives. In the climate the industry currently finds itself in, staying organized is of the utmost importance. Check out our tips and tricks for how to stay organized during COVID-19 below so that you can stay front-of-mind with planners and set yourself up for group business success.
Discover 8 ways hoteliers can stay organized during COVID-19:
1. Control the controllables.
You're going to be interrupted throughout your day while working from home, but not every interruption has to happen. There are some interruptions that can be controlled, or even eliminated. In an interview with multiple career experts, Jacquelyn Smith of Forbes went over some basic methods to reduce the number of distractions during your work day that are well within control.
-
Ask your team for uninterrupted work time during your most productive hours of the day. Emergencies may arise, but if your team knows that you need that time to yourself, you're more likely to get it.
-
Turn email or phone notifications off during certain hours as well. This will minimize the chances that you will get distracted and stop working on priority tasks.
-
Organize your work space to reduce the amount of visual distractions.
Things have changed but our commitment to you is the same. How can we help?
2. Create a schedule/checklist.
Making a daily schedule for yourself and your team will greatly assist in keeping everyone organized. As you're able to prioritize the workload that's coming at you daily, it will enable your team to jump on those priority tasks and not lose focus on the other important items they're working on. As explored by Calendar's Abby Miller, there are many benefits to creating a schedule, including:
- The creation of benchmarks to assess how long certain tasks actually take.
- Reducing the likelihood of doing double work.
- Enabling team members to feel that they truly "own" their work.
It's also important to be aware of unscheduled dead time between meetings. Those 15-30 minute segments of time can kill productivity if not accounted for!
3. Embrace meetings.
As stated in a recent article from Forbes, “without the ability to have the organic conversations that in-person offices allow, virtual meetings, whether impromptu or scheduled, will be the lifeblood of how people engage with one another.”
Embracing this shift will be key in keeping everyone engaged and on task when managing this crisis. Holding a daily stand-up meeting for 15 minutes can pay dividends in productivity and ensure that team members are connected with each other and know what needs to be done daily. Additionally, ensure that you are running productive meetings that include a purpose, a solid start and end time, and close with action items for those in the meeting.
4. Prioritize and focus on impact vs. effort.
The biggest key to scheduling your time wisely is prioritizing. Keeping an honest account of tasks that are urgent and important will help you and your team divide and conquer during the pandemic.
In his book, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Dr. Stephen Covey explores the Eisenhower Matrix — defining how tasks should be prioritized according to their importance and urgency. The quadrants and how they are defined can be found below:
-
Quadrant 1: URGENT and IMPORTANT
-
Quadrant 2: NON-URGENT and IMPORTANT
-
Quadrant 3: URGENT and NOT IMPORTANT
-
Quadrant 4 - NOT URGENT and NOT IMPORTANT
In addition to this tool, the 1-3-5 rule is another popular method of maximizing your time. In short, it gives people a way to focus on accomplishing one big thing, three medium things, and five little things each day. It's even used by Betty Liu, the executive vice chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, to stay organized.
"I have to say, it's been an amazing productivity booster," Liu told Business Insider. "Just the act of writing something down makes you obligated to do it. And when you have the satisfaction at the end of the day of checking off that last item on that list, you feel so much better, as if you really completed the day."
5. Keep tabs on the pulse of the industry.
No one know when the COVID-19 pandemic will truly be over and when restrictions will be lifted, so staying informed and in touch with the industry will help you better plan your days and how you're spending your time. If you aren’t aware of a shift, you can’t prepare for it. However, there are many resources available for you to do just that.
Familiarize yourself with venue sourcing data.
On May 15, we hosted the second webinar in our monthly series dedicated to providing insights on the group business landscape. The series is based on proprietary data from the Cvent Supplier Network, overall meetings and events trends, and observations from proven third-party experts in the hospitality space. We also include inspiring stories about the good works and great ideas currently driving the hospitality community forward. Highlights from the CSN sourcing data include:
- A deeper dive into differences by market size and location.
- How proposed rates from hotels have changed over the past 60 days.
- Updates in sourcing trends over the past 30 days.
Be an active member of the hospitality community.
Another fantastic resource available to hoteliers is the various blogs and forums for hoteliers to virtually gather. The Cvent Community is a great place to start. It hosts a myriad of resources and open forums for your to read up on what your peers and colleagues are doing and how they're utilizing their time during the pandemic. Hospitality Net is another excellent resource with interviews and op-eds that will give you even more insight.
Browse through hospitality blogs.
Along with the Cvent Community, there's a lot of helpful insight in the Cvent Blog, with articles ranging from best marketing practices using the Cvent Supplier Network to how hotels are adapting during the COVID-19 pandemic to best practices for working remotely in this new normal. Leveraging this resource for best practices and insights into the minds of planners will help you stay focused on your priority tasks and inform your choices for when you're planning out the days, weeks and months ahead. Other helpful hospitality blogs include Boutique Hotel News, BizBash, and Smart Meetings.
See how your competitors are faring.
Cvent's Competitive Set Dashboard helps hoteliers understand how group demand, response patterns, and awarded business compare with up to 10 competitors in real time, enabling confident, data-driven business decisions.
With this tool, you can:
- Know where you stand in real time regarding rank and fair share within your competitive set.
- See performance summary and ranks with year-over-year changes and trending data.
- Measure your sales team’s effectiveness in winning deals by comparing your key performance metrics against those of the competition.
- View trending performance throughout the entire funnel or at a specific stage in the funnel over time.
- Monitor your sales team's activity and performance.
- Receive email alerts if your property falls behind the competitive set in important performance metrics.
6. Learn to time box.
One popular method of time management is the Pomodoro Technique. Created by Francesco Cirillo, the Pomodoro Technique enables people to focus on tasks one at a time for set periods of time with short breaks in between to recharge focus. The time management system is fairly simple:
-
Choose a task to be accomplished.
-
Set the timer to 25 minutes.
-
Work on the task until the timer rings, then put a check on your sheet of paper.
-
Take a short break (5-10 minutes).
-
Every 4 work periods, take a longer break.
The technique was tested by The Muse's Kat Boogaard for a recent article, and when sharing the results, she wrote, in part:
"After some time, the technique started to really gel with me. I was focused and insanely productive during my work time, as I was eager to get as much completed during that 25-minute interval as I could. I didn’t find myself mindlessly scrolling through Facebook or getting sucked in by those pesky clickbait articles. And, as a notorious multi-tasker, I noticed that I was totally zoned in on the one project at hand."
7. Sync in the cloud for real-time updates.
In this environment, hoteliers must leverage all the technology they can to streamline processes and best utilize all available employee hours. You need all hands on deck, and training your staff on your hotel’s unique technology mix will empower them to help you. Additionally, keeping your team informed and up-to-date on all projects and initiatives will ensure that they are working at their maximum capacity.
As stated by PMI in a recent study, “collaborative software unites the virtual workforce and attempts to make the experience of working together as natural and productive as working in the same physical location” — a crucial factor as most organizations continue to adapt to the work-from-home lifestyle.
8. Save time when responding to RFPs.
Planners are still planning and submitting RFPs. The timing of these events has shifted due to gathering restrictions, but the requests are still out there, and they'll keep coming. Make sure your team is responding and that you're not losing out on potential business. Creating and utilizing RFP templates can help in that effort. Check out our best practices for streamlining RFP responses to help you do just that. Additionally, use this RFP response example to streamline the process and make sure everyone on your team is on the same page.
Also, if your hotel has lead scoring to prioritize the most relevant RFPs, leverage it — and make sure your staff knows how to use it, too. It will ensure that they're maximizing every second they spend responding to RFPs. This forward-looking planning will help set your hotel up for success once the gathering restrictions are lifted.
Use these tips to help you stay organized during COVID-19
It’s no secret that the hospitality industry is hurting right now, but it won't always be like this. Keeping in touch with the industry and what experts are saying will keep you organized in the short term, but as we stated above, hoteliers also have to take the long view for when this does end. Be sure to communicate updates to team members and keep them looped in on shifts in the industry and mitigating strategies.
