Celebrating Housekeepers - Stephanie Leger, First Rate Hospitality

Josiah: 0:00

Today we're diving deep into a role that is central to our ability to provide hospitality, and that is housekeeping. International Housekeeping Week is coming up, and today we're joined by Stephanie Leger, Chief Excellence Officer at First Rate Hospitality. With a track record of leadership that includes roles at luxury brands such as Ritz Carlton, as well as serving as a service evaluator for Forbes Travel Guide, Stephanie has now trained more than 20,000 people in hospitality to date. In this episode, we'll explore the significance of housekeeping in the guest experience, discuss common pitfalls in training and even touch on something called the Housekeeping Olympics. Stick around if you want to learn more about how to care for and celebrate the people working in this essential role.

Stephanie: 1:06

So International Housekeeping Week started in 1981 with the Housekeeping Executives Association, and so they really wanted to start a week to being able to recognize the hard work that housekeeping does, and now we call it the heart of the house. And so it started off just here in the US and now has grown to being international in Hong Kong, ireland, all other major cities and what it is is it's a week that the hotels do special recognition for the housekeeping department. So maybe they'll do one day they'll do a breakfast for the team, the next day maybe they'll do a potluck lunch and raffle off some gift cards and even working with their vendors also too. So it's not just having the hotel to put this on, and so each day is a different theme and a different activity. One of my other favorite ones is getting the managers from different departments and helping the housekeepers for the day. So maybe they come in they're doing all the vacuuming for their rooms or changing the pillowcases or cleaning the bathroom. But it's a cool event and it's just a great week to be able to recognize specially for the housekeeping department.

Josiah: 2:39

That's actually how I started my career and there's nothing like actually cleaning a room to show you hospitality can be a lot of work. It's a lot of fun, but it can also be a lot of work. But I think it's good for everybody to recognize that and, even if you don't work in housekeeping, appreciating the work that's involved in providing that it's a big piece of the experience right.

Stephanie: 2:57

Exactly. I mean, it's the department that the guests will always experience what's staying in a room, and from sales to reservations for even accounting. There's so many other departments that rely on the housekeeping department for their department to be successful.

Josiah: 3:18

All right. In the introduction I teased something called the Housekeeping Olympics, and so here's Stephanie explaining a little bit more about what this is.

Stephanie: 3:27

So I've seen this in other major cities with Housekeeping Olympics and now that I've established, you know, residency in Miami and working a lot in the Miami hospitality industry, I was like we need to bring housekeeping Olympics. We have so many hotels, we have over 65,000 guest rooms right here in Miami and this will be a great way for us to have this housekeeping Olympics. It's going to be held at our Miami Beach Convention Center, so a big area, and also, too, for our season. We're kicking off our season because we're going into the winter months, so this is a great way, too, for all the hospitality individuals to get together. We're just coming off of our slow summer season. Everyone's been on their vacation and now we're ready to see where the season brings us this year.

Josiah: 4:28

This is great. So are there other judges and awards?

Stephanie: 4:31

Yeah, so we're going to have different activities like who can vacuum the fastest, or bed making, and then also having the hotels bring their employees from other departments to cheer their team on. So it's also a great motivational experience for the hotel employees and cheering and just a great fun way. And then also to having vendors, you know, seeing their clients, and then also to rooting their clients on.

Josiah: 5:02

I love it. Is there anything special that you've focused on with regard to housekeeping, as separated from other teams?

Stephanie: 5:10

Yeah, so also to part of my experiences. I worked with a staffing agency that provided staffing for the housekeeping department, and my role was to go in and train the housekeepers. So you, as the guests, don't realize that they may not be part of the brand, that they are part of a different staffing agency or a temp agency, and so you know we're seeing it happen more and more in the housekeeping department, and so that is one thing that I focus on with training is making sure that it's the entire department is there, no matter if they're part of the staffing agency or they're working directly for the hotel. But we're here for the guests, and the guests aren't going to care if you're not part of the hotel or part of the hotel, they're still going to. If anything goes wrong, or even positive, they're still going to go to the hotel on their feedback and so make sure you know that we're keeping everything together as a team when it comes to the training.

Josiah: 6:17

It's important for training, I think, just overall. I was talking to Matt Gorman at Upshift a couple of days ago and he was saying one of the biggest things that he sees is with regards to temporary work or people maybe not being full-time employees of a company is they get a lot of feedback where sometimes they're treated as almost like second tier citizens versus the full-time staff and it's a big turn off. Obviously right, and so it sounds like from a training perspective, from just an experience perspective, you know whether or not somebody is employed by your hotel, you have to treat all of your people they are working in and around your business really well and exactly exact, and then also to having that communication as well.

Stephanie: 6:56

So, okay, here we're celebrating housekeeping week, our hotel, we're going to do this, this, and this. Are you talking to your agencies and you know, are you able to contribute to this? Or we're going to do this for your team? Can you meet us halfway on something of this? Because you know there's so many times that I've seen where there has been some type of hotel celebration and then told, oh, you can't attend because you're not part of the brand or directly from the hotel. And we, at the beginning, how we were talking about culture, you know how is this setting up a positive culture? You know they're coming into work, they're helping you actually out of making sure that you can turn the house, and now you're not, you know, able to have them be part of a birthday celebration or pizza party. So it's sad when I see that.