Management position within hospitality industry

The most complex work in the hotel in terms of communication and of coordinating and completing working documents is done by Floor Managers. These employees often supervise others who perform service tasks directly for the guests. Floor Managers are responsible for liaising between Room Attendants on the guest floors and managers in the housekeeping office.

Qualifications required are a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in hotel management, and work experience in hospitality industry. At the basement-level housekeeping office, Floor Managers report and monitor room status and special room requests received from other parts of the hotel. They check the computer-generated status reports for discrepancies from their visual checks of the actual rooms. If a room coded for check-out appeared occupied on the floor, they would check the Expected Departure report on the computer to see if the guest had actually checked out (Bardi 2002).

Usually, the main requires are:

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Supervision

Inventory management

Quality Control

Coordination of other managers and staff

Shipping and receiving

Documentary control (Floor Manager Position 2007).

The responsibilities are:

Each one supervises 15 Room Attendants and two Housemen, covering three to four floors, or 240–320 rooms.

On the floors, they check the status and progress of room cleaning, inspected rooms and augmented the Room Attendants' work.

One of their duties, for example, is putting triple bed sheets and extra amenities in VIP rooms.

They have to get the extra sheet, then take some of the bedding off and remake the bed. The number of VIPs they had to do beds for is never predictable, and they have to squeeze them into their regularly scheduled activities.

The number of floors and rooms Floor Managers are responsible for varied, too, because of airline employee guests, who rarely checked out until after the day shift finished, and because of movement in the predicted house counts (overall room occupancies) (Powers and Barrows 2002).

The Floor Managers are all in the office together at three times during the day: the beginning and end of the shift, and during the midmorning clearing and briefing meeting. These are busy, but not clearly structured times, with managers picking up special supplies, double-checking irregularities in the room status reports, answering phones. In Hilton Hotels, for instance, Floor Managers work is organized as follows:

workday starts, between 7 and 8;
the Floor Managers come in and prepared their own worksheets for the day;
they check the 6:30 a.m. room status reports and special requests, along with the log book confirming their floor assignments; then they go up on the floors to check the room status and supply needs with each Room Attendant, who has verified their status as soon as she/he arrives on the floor;

Floor Managers then return downstairs to check and adjust room assignments against the Coordinator's log book (Powers and Barrows 2002).
For example, some rooms in the early-morning computer status report noted as vacant and clean may have become occupied in the interim. Or vacant and clean rooms may have become VIP or rush rooms, which Floor Managers would hear about in the office and have to inform the Room Attendant about. In many cases, Floor Manager’s position is called a “supervisor”.

Floor Managers themselves have to identify VIP rooms and they have to spend extra time to set up the rooms, and collect and deliver the extras. The VIP rooms could not be neglected, and they are seldom blocked (assigned by Front Desk) in advance. So throughout the day, Floor Managers have to monitor upcoming VIP rooms and prepare them in time for the guests' arrival (Powers and Barrows 2002).

Work stress and pressure is a remarkable feature of this position. Very often, checking room reports against their lists, for example, is interrupted by a ringing telephone or a co-worker's query. Most often the interruption involves a guest's urgent request, which demanded an immediate response. People write down notes, speak on the phone to guests, page others to fill requests and relay orders to the Centralized Action Room. Several talks at once; seldom are the exchange restricted to two people (Stutts 2001).

Floor Managers work primarily from photocopied forms attached to clipboards that they fill out each day as they completed their work. The worksheets serve as organizational tools, memory aids and long-term records, to be boxed and stored for a prescribed number of years. From my observations throughout the hotel, the computers stored information on sales, purchases, personnel and payroll, and guests and occupancy rather than any detailed records of daily work.

And unless each Floor Manager is equipped with a hand-held computer, inputting such information would have been impractical when there is already a paper record. In the basement office, Floor Managers also check for recent special requests like rush rooms or VIPs, or they receive them as phone messages, occasionally via pager (Stutts 2001).

References

Bardi J.A. (2002). Hotel Front Office Management Wiley; 3 edition.
Floor Manager Position (2007). Retrieved 01 July 2007,
Powers T., Barrows C.W. (2002). Introduction to the Hospitality Industry. Wiley, 5 edition.
Stutts A. (2001). Hotel and Lodging Management. An Introduction. Wiley.

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