Maintaining the Safety and Wellness of Staff and Clients in the Housekeeping Department
Introduction
Housekeeping is a necessary activity for any establishment, whether in hospitality or commercial lines. The functions in housekeeping ensure that cleanliness, sanitation, orderliness, and maintenance are performed on schedule and at par with the service level standards set forth.
In the hospitality sector, especially, it is essential to focus on maintaining good housekeeping standards because of the impact it has on the customers.
Prompt and high-standard housekeeping contributes directly to establishment profits and provides a clean environment. This is important for the staff to work unhindered in safe spaces.
Let’s take a look at how you can ensure that.
Objectives of Hotel Housekeeping
The objectives of hotel housekeeping are pretty straightforward. The aim is to maintain safe and clean working and living environments for everyone inside the establishment.
- The major objective is to maintain the cleanliness standards of the hotel
- The second objective is to make the cleaning and sanitization processes more effective and efficient
- To use equipment and materials that are high quality and safe for use by and around humans
- To effectively manage hotel linens and keep the laundry clean and in service
- Pest control is one of the most important aspects of hotel housekeeping
- To maintain the interior aesthetics as per the design
- To clean and maintain all the furniture, fixtures, and fittings inside the building
Methods to Maintain Safety and Wellness of Staff and Clients
In order to maintain service level cleanliness and sanitization levels for your hotel staff, you can adopt three broadly categorized methods. They cover roughly all the aspects that require provisioning a safe working environment for the employees and staff.
1. Property Inspections
Every region has its own service levels for hygiene, cleanliness, and sanitization defined by the law for minimum compliance. With that said, to ensure that your workers receive a working environment that feels as safe and clean as home, your establishment must go above and beyond the legal compliance standards.
There is a real risk to your employees and staff of experiencing the Sick Building Syndrome. It is a condition where one or more employees working in a building experience illness from being inside it.
Some of the reasons contributing to the Sick Building Syndrome are mold, poor ventilation, repeated use of chemicals inside the building, bad equipment, etc.
The main thing to do to ensure that these reasons don’t put your employees at risk is to regularly maintain the Heating, Ventilation, and Air-Conditioning (HVAC) systems at your establishment.
Additionally, scheduled property inspections that check for signs of contamination or possible health risks should be done to ensure that Sick Building Syndrome is checked off.
2. Education on Cleanliness, First Aid, and Hygiene
The COVID-19 pandemic has taught the world an extremely valuable lesson: to maintain distance from those who are sick and to maintain personal hygiene. However, as the pandemic receded, people have become a little lax in observing these mandates.
Ensuring that your employees and staff are regularly educated on the latest health and safety protocols is essential. This is necessary to ensure that pathogens or disease does not spread within the facility, even unintentionally.
Every employee must be educated about the implications of their behavior on the overall health and safety of their co-workers. For example, using the toilet and not flushing afterward creates an extremely risky environment for other users of the restroom as well.
In addition to basic health and hygiene education, the staff must know the protocol to follow if a risk is detected. Prevention is better than cure, and when your employees have the right knowledge, the work environment will be safer.
Adopting Technological Tools
The society we live in today is extremely technology-forward, and if your establishment is yet to adopt the right health and safety gadgets and systems, it is time to do it now.
The fact that the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence allows for automation helps your establishment automatically perform the basic cleaning and sanitization operations without having to employ manpower.
For example, auto-cleaning toilets, auto-flushing toilets, and sensor-based taps ensure a no-touch usage of the restroom facility, controlling the spread of germs should there be any on people’s hands. Air filters and purifiers can be programmed to ramp up or tone down their functions based on the load the facility is experiencing.
The use of technology is an enabler for your hospitality establishment to achieve higher than precedented levels of cleanliness, and it is now necessary to have such systems in place.
Wrapping up
Hospitality establishments experience high volumes of traffic, especially during the busy season. It is easy for the facility to get swamped with health risks if cleanliness and hygiene aren’t maintained in the schedule.
It becomes even riskier for staff working at the facility – they are at higher risk and exposure to the pathogen load that is built up.
Follow the guide above to ensure that legal cleanliness compliances are met and that your establishment provides a healthy working environment for all workers.
