The hospitality sector is currently facing a significant challenge. While seeking to offer increasingly personalised and excellent experiences to its guests, it is facing a shortage of skilled labour and difficulty in retaining talent. During the summer months, for example, hotels face an exponential increase in the number of guests. This growth, combined with employee holidays, creates an imbalance between labour supply and demand. To ensure consistent service levels, it is common for hotels to resort to seasonal workers, but this brings new challenges, such as agile hiring, rapid integration and optimised schedules.
In addition, many professionals leave the sector due to a lack of predictability, incompatible schedules with their personal lives, or excessive workloads, all of which directly contribute to the difficulty of retaining professionals in this sector.
WFM solutions enhance service quality
With teams under pressure, unpredictable seasonal peaks and growing customer demands, workforce management has become a strategic priority. More than just an operational solution, WFM tools have become an integral part of talent retention and attraction strategies in the hospitality industry, enabling the digital transformation of the entire team management operation through the automation of schedules and shifts, digital time recording, and management of working time, including overtime and absences.
WFM also allows for a better work-life balance, fairer schedules and greater transparency, helping hotels to:
- Keep employees motivated
- Attract professionals who value flexibility
- educe burnout and turnover
One of the solutions that best meets the sector’s needs is the practice of ‘Open Shifts’, which involves offering available positions to hospitality professionals who can then choose their preferred date and time via an app, thereby filling gaps caused by labour shortages in the sector. This model enhances flexibility, ensuring that last-minute needs or peaks in demand are quickly covered without compromising service quality.
Predictability is a key factor for the sector
The use of digital tools, such as workforce management solutions, not only helps automate processes but also offers greater transparency and predictability to managers and employees. Real Hotels Group, a Portuguese hotel chain with over 1,000 employees and 20 hotels across the country, sees the use of SISQUAL® WFM as a transformative element in its operations, having facilitated the entire internal management of the group: The hotel sector operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and with that being said, ‘SISQUAL WFM has made it possible to monitor our hotel operations and teams in real-time,’ explains Nádia Sousa, Human Resources Director of the hotel chain.
With over 1,300 employees and several luxury hotels in Portugal, the Savoy Signature hotel group has also invested in SISQUAL® WFM to meet the challenges of managing dispersed teams with variable schedules, helping to increase commitment, reduce absenteeism and optimise operations across all units.
At a time when labour shortages threaten the ability of hotels to maintain their standards of excellence, investing in a solution that simplifies schedule and task management translates into operational sustainability, quality of service and well-being for teams. The hotel industry of the future is expected to be digital, flexible and people-centred, and the future has already begun.
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