Hospitality Season Is Here, Is Your Frontline Staff Motivated?

Is your hospitality business prepared to provide exceptional customer service during the busy summer months? How are you motivating your frontline staff during the hospitality season?

Whether you own a hotel, restaurant, resort, or another tourist destination, you're likely to see a spike in customers during June, July, and August. These months present a crucial opportunity to prioritize customer experiences and build long-lasting customer relationships. But you must ensure that your frontline staff are motivated, energized, and up for the task.

Employee incentive programs offer a quick and easy method of motivating your essential workers during the hospitality season. Here's how you can keep them energized and motivated through incentives:

Improve employee motivation with incentive programs

The basic structure of an employee incentive program is offering some sort of reward for employees who achieve certain goals. In the hospitality industry, these goals may be:

Receiving a positive customer review
Going a specific amount of time without calling off
Working a certain amount of overtime

Meanwhile, rewards may include gift cards, PTO days, or bonuses (paid easily by Virtual Visa Gift card).

Hospitality season can be busy and chaotic, and during the stress of this time, your employees' customer service may begin to decline. Motivating employees through any of the following incentive programs can ensure that your business maintains a positive reputation through the most crucial season of the year:

Incentivize good client experience surveys

Receiving positive customer feedback is an important factor in your business's success. When this feedback is public — such as on a review platform like Yelp — it acts as an effective marketing tool. But even private feedback can be beneficial, as it can help you feel confident that your hospitality business is doing something right.

Your employees' behavior can significantly impact customer feedback. Consider incentivizing good client experience surveys with a points-to-rewards program. For example, employees can receive points for every positive survey with their name on it, and then redeem those points for gift cards.

Offer employee-of-the-season rewards

Competition is an excellent motivator, and there's nothing like a little friendly competition to engage and energize employees. To keep your employee motivation high through the summer months, consider implementing an "Employee of the Season" reward.

You can evaluate employees on several metrics depending on your specific business. For instance, restaurants may gauge the performance of their wait staff based on:

The number of shifts they work each week
Verbal feedback from customers
Their average weekly tips

If you decide to implement an Employee of the Season program, make sure employees know exactly what they need to do to earn this reward. Without specific metrics in place, your employees may feel they have no chance of winning, which reduces their motivation significantly.

Reward frontline employees for hours worked

A survey from the American Hotel & Lodging Association found that 97% of hotels are experiencing staffing shortages. The hospitality industry as a whole is struggling to find workers, which means your business probably requires employees to work overtime each week.

Encouraging overtime can be challenging. The extra money may motivate some employees, but others would rather prioritize their free time.

To motivate employees to work overtime, consider a milestone-based incentive program that rewards employees for working extra. For instance, consider a reward for every 10, 20, 30, and 50 extra hours an employee works during the hospitality season.

Simplify employee incentives with Giftbit

Most employees won't work harder out of the kindness of their hearts; they need an incentive. With Giftbit, you can offer gift card rewards your employees want — and automate the entire process.