Well-trained staff can help improve productivity and efficiencies and can free up your valuable management time. Now here are seven ways to maximise the impact of your hotel training.

The quality of service and care your guests experience – and the likelihood of returning – is probably as much down to your team and how they care for your guests as it is about the quality of food, your choice of decor or the crispness of your linen.

There are many reasons why hoteliers may be tempted to cut back on training, but developing your team is a critical factor in keeping your hotel standing out from the competition.

Not only does it provide consistency in customer service; well-trained staff can help improve productivity and efficiencies and can free up your valuable management time.

Investing in your team also helps them feel valued. This leads to better employee engagement and motivation, and can help your business establish a reputation as a good employer, enabling you to attract – and keep – the best people.

But if you’re yet to realise the benefits of training, here are some ideas on how to reap its full potential:

1. Create a Culture

Make learning a part of the day-to-day activity, where it’s second nature for people to help and support one another, and to learn on the job. It should be okay to ask questions and to admit that you don’t know all the answers, where you’re encouraged to seek out new activities and it’s accepted that people will fail occasionally as long as you learn from experience.

2. Know What You Want

Before embarking on any training establish your expectation, what you want to improve, and why.

Ask yourself how you’ll know when it’s been successful. Not every problem equates to a training need.

Avoid the sheep dip approach; only involve those who’ll benefit; and have an opportunity to it put into practice.

No one wants to sit through something that is a repeat of what they’ve already done, irrelevant to their job, or insult their intelligence as they’ve been doing the job to standard for many years already.

3. Be Creative

Stop thinking about training purely as an activity that takes place in a classroom. Formal off-job training can present logistical challenges, particularly with complicated shift patterns.

Use everyday activities as opportunities for development. Use team meetings to direct focus and reinforce messages. Assign tasks or projects on real business issues, identify staff champions, encourage job swaps and cross training for greater flexibility amongst the team.

4. Plan Ahead

It’s disruptive for everyone involved when people are given inadequate notice.

Being concerned about your day-to-day duties not being covered will at best be distracting. Give forethought for people’s schedules, busy periods in their working week or month and consideration for a life outside work.

So give plenty of warning, and remember to tell them what they’ll be learning and why.

5. Make it Engaging and Fun

Get people involved. Ask for opinions, add energizers and group activities.

Use team exercises to encourage interaction, and quizzes and games to add an element of competition and fun.

Add variety. Do something different to what people are used to; make it interesting and memorable.

Take people away from their normal environment (as long as this doesn’t make them feel uncomfortable), use interesting presenters or even actors.

6. Make it Transferable

Make the transition from theory to practice easy. Use relevant examples to help people relate the principles to their own job.

Help them identify situations where they can put their learning into practice as quickly as possible, preferably within the next day or two.

Identify obstacles that might prevent this happening. Do they have the necessary resources, time, authority, peer support and opportunity to put their learning into practice?

Don’t expect perfection straight away. People need time to practise and find their own way of doing things, and they shouldn’t feel afraid to make the odd mistake when they apply their new learning, so long as they learn from it. It can take a while to instil new habits, so put checks in place to reduce the likelihood of reverting back to the ‘old’ way. Assigning a mentor, coach or buddy can help overcome the initial barriers to perfecting a new skill.

7. Measuring your Return

Don’t continue to invest in learning and development activities unless they are paying dividends. However recognise and be prepared for the fact that sometimes this will be a long-term return.