Testing the robustness of our hotel and training systems - holiday and sickness times
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2010-08-11 12:05:27 - Graham Ellis"No matter what's going on behind the scenes, the customer comes first". Grand theory - but what does that say in practice?
It says that a company such as ourselves should have sufficient robustness in place to carry on with scarcely a missed beat if one of us is off sick. Even if another one happens to be on holiday when it happens. And it means that once the immediate / urgent / time dependent customer service is dealt with, we should have sufficient robustness to be able to catch up on routine tasks which we were able to put off in the white heat of stepping in, and to plan forward and pick up all the important (but non urgent) tasks that were postponable when the person went off sick, continuing to do so until they return.
Grand theory ... and (regrettably) we've had a chance to see how it works for us in practice over the last few days. We're out of "immediate panic" mode now, and into phase 2 - catching up. I'm rather pleased with how we've coped. I know of three things that were missed; one room didn't have its rubbish bin emptied one day, another was let with a bottle of toilet cleaner left in the bathroom beside the toilet rather than being returned to the maid's cupboard, and our "convertible" room (twin or double) was missing the pieces of trim that we put on the headboard brackets that aren't in use when it's double.
I'm actually rather pleased with how well it's gone. And we've rescheduled our "shift pattern" so that we can continue to recover for as long as Chris takes to get better and back to work; we wish him a speedy recovery but tell him not to worry about us (I know he'll be reading this ;-)). He can also be re-assured that we certainly couldn't manage as we are in the longer term!
Those of you who know me will know I have a number of fingers in other "pies" too - typically community interest stuff where I give time as and when I have it available. I seem to be fairly well know locally for the stuff I've been doing to help get an appropriate public transport service for Melksham, via "Save the Train", the TransWilts Community Rail Partnership, the Melksham Railway Development Group, and the First Great Western Coffee Shop. There there's the Melksham Chamber of Commerce, the Melksham Community Area Partnership, and I do a bit of website stuff for the Melksham Carnival. For some of those, it looks like there will be less "as and when" time for the next weeks - but I do come to realise at times like this what good friends I have in each of those setups, and how even the rail ones that I was heavily involved in setting up now run very much with a life of their own.