19 Hotels, One Digital Hub
Our team at RHW Management shares a deep commitment to exceeding guest expectations by keeping a vigilant eye on market trends and arming our dedicated staffers with the technology they need to continue raising the bar for service across all of our properties. For our 600+ employees working hard every day to serve our customers across 19 different hotel properties, communication is very much synonymous with success. As the director of operations, making sure our back of house processes like payroll, scheduling, and HR software run efficiently is also a top priority.
The Path to Going Digital with Beekeeper
In today’s fast-paced, mobile-first world, workforce digitization becomes imperative. At RHW Management, we chose to embrace digitization in the interest of saving time, avoiding miscommunications, and keeping employees focused on delivering a superior guest experience.
To test our employees’ willingness to engage digitally, I created a few Facebook groups to see if centralized mobile communication could be a practice our employees would embrace. While Facebook groups slightly helped engagement, limitations to the platform such as a reluctance to blend personal and professional lives prevented mass adoption. After affirming our teams’ appetites for digital connection at work, we sought to adopt a tool that combined the engaging, community-oriented aspects of social media with the organizational prowess and security of company email and intranet services.
Enter Beekeeper, the mobile-first digital workplace platform we selected after carefully researching the employee engagement app landscape. Beekeeper, we discovered quickly after adoption, seamlessly blended cross-organizational communication and streamlined operations tools into a single digital app. Beekeeper gives us a technological backbone with the right amount of back-end sophistication, while maintaining front-end simplicity so employees at all technical levels could use the tool with ease. Since our initial rollout of Beekeeper at our General Manager’s Conference, we’ve learned some valuable lessons about the positive impact that a digital workplace can have for hospitality businesses at scale. Today, I’d like to share a few with you.
Building Strong Culture Through Great Content
One of the richest add values we have experienced since our adoption of Beekeeper is the proliferation of company culture through content sharing. When introducing Beekeeper to our staffers, I took a very deliberate approach with delegation and expectation management for our content calendar. Because Beekeeper is outfitted with the ability to send out digital check-ins and automate workflows, our leadership teams found it easy to assign content production to specific departments, as well as check back up on progress.
Because our 600-person workforce spans over 19 different hotel properties, customized content deployment is also helpful. In addition to sharing informational or engaging materials, we also utilize the content calendar to spotlight employees who display “rockstar” behavior. Recognizing the strong work ethic of high-performing employees in a public way has proven to inspire our team and build a strong sense of meaning and culture throughout our organization.
Achieving Streamlined Operations Through Tech
As Director of Operations at RHW, ensuring that tools and processes related to the employee experience—HR, payroll, benefits, scheduling, and beyond—are both easy to access and serve as minimal distractions to the greater task at hand is of utmost importance. After adopting Beekeeper, one of the first things we implemented was digital scheduling.
Migrating scheduling to digital served two purposes: one, it cut down on waste, confusion due to last minute changes, and barriers to access, allowing employees to check their schedule from anywhere. Two, it gave all employees a reason to log into Beekeeper regularly. Providing our employees with this mandatory digital touchpoint helped them more seamlessly integrate the tool into their day-to-day routine.
Quantifying Performance and Engagement Through Analytics
Another great benefit of bringing Beekeeper on board is the fact that I can now easily pull employee performance and engagement analytics using the analytics dashboard. I can quickly assess how our FAQ webinars and monthly focus calls resonated with our colleagues by deploying pulse surveys and assessing comprehension digitally.
In addition to performance, engagement is an important metric that the analytics dashboard enables us to measure. Beekeeper’s chatbot survey feature allows me to survey employees across our 19 properties in a cost-effective and efficient way. I can quickly garner feedback about new processes or ways to improve the day-to-day experience of our hard-working employees.
Overall, going digital with Beekeeper has allowed us to build a more positive work environment for our employees through increased access to communication channels, as well as streamlined operations tools. Rolling out Beekeeper encouraged our employees to let their unique personalities shine, giving them a platform to find greater fulfillment and develop a more personal connection with their mission-critical contributions to our organization.
David Montero is director of operations at RHW Management.