At my last job, a
supervisor of guest services for a ski resort, I faced many conflicts. The one that will always stand out is the one
between Guest Services and Housekeeping.
This was a long ongoing feud which seems destine to continue, so my goal
was to keep relations between the evening housekeeping staff and myself as
civil as possible. This was not always
easy.
Now for a little
background, our housekeeping department is consistently short staffed. They are never able to hire enough people to
do the jobs they do correctly. Is this
because the upper management looks the other way when it comes to that
department, is it because the manager is a less than nice person to work for or
is it because there are never any consequences handed down for major issues
such as rooms marked as clean when they are really dirty. Whatever the reason for housekeeping being
short staffed it was beyond my capability for resolving so I was left to deal
with things as they were.
One night during an
extremely busy checking period one of our guest went to their room to find it
an absolute mess. It appeared that no
one had even entered it to clean at all, even though it was listed as “clean”
in the system. My first step in dealing
with the situation was to verify the state of the room with housekeeping. I called them and ask a supervisor to meet me
in the room to look it over. We arrived
and sure enough it was a disaster. This
is where the conflict began. Generally
when a room is found to be dirty we simply move the guest to another room and
have housekeeping clean it. The problem
this night was there were no other rooms to move them too. I didn’t even have an upgrade to give them,
all the units were either occupied or listed as “dirty” and had not been
cleaned that day.
When the housekeeping
supervisor asked me to move them to another room I had to tell her that all of
the vacant rooms I had were “dirty”, to which she took offence. We went back to our offices to search the
computer to see what we could find. She
called me and agreed that all the vacant rooms were in fact listed as “dirty”;
this is where the negotiating began. She
told me she could have it clean in about 90 minutes, however this was not going
to work for the poor people who were at my counter expecting to check in. I asked if she could have it done sooner, she
replied that she did not have the staff to get it down sooner. As I could not give up any of my staff to
help I quickly realized that the only two people who may be able to help out
were she and I. As much as neither of us
wanted to go clean a room at 7:30pm, I didn’t see any other choice. After a little back and forth we agreed it
was the best option and we went to clean the room.
Was the outcome ideal
for either of us, No, but it was what had to happen. She didn’t have the staff to help and I had
an angry customer in front of me. As
Berman (2008) pointed out in negotiations everyone has to give up some thing
for the greater good of the company. I
could have played the “its your department you figure it out” card, but what
would that have solved? In fact that
probably would have made the cleaning time greater out of spite alone.
One thing I would
have changed within the conflict is that I would have had a bit more compassion
for her. She had just started her shift
and I was not directly her fault that the room was not clean. She was having to deal with her department’s
own shortcomings as well as whatever I was piling on top. In the end it all worked out for the best and
it may have even brought the departments closer, at least those on the night
staff of each department.
Berman, J. (2008, February
10). Conflict Resolution - Part 1. Retrieved August 22, 2015.
Berman, J. (2008,
February 10). Conflict Resolution - Part 2. Retrieved August 22, 2015.
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