Inter-Departmental Relationship | Housekeeping

[1st Semester Accommodation Operations | UNIT 6 BHM114 | IHM Notes]

Inter-Departmental Relationship with Front Office

▪ To ensure efficient rooming of guests, both housekeeping and front office must inform each other of changes in a room’s status. Knowing whether a room is occupied, vacant, on change, out of order (OOO), under repair, or similar for proper room management

▪ There should be coordination to clean front office public areas

▪ There must be coordination between housekeeping and front office department to share information on occupancy levels which helps to forecast occupancy for the year and makes it easier to draw up a budget, establish par stock levels and estimate required staff strength.

▪ There should be coordination know about the daily room report and housekeeping discrepancy report.

▪ It also helps to gear renovations and spring cleaning to low occupancy periods thereby preventing loss of revenue.

▪ The housekeeping and front office department also coordinate with each other for other important information which requires special attention like

▪ VIPs in the house: this information is essential so that the staff can take a little extra care and keener precautions in cleaning and supervising VIP rooms.

▪ Groups in the house: the group rooming list must be provided before the group’s arrival to the housekeeping as groups tend to move together in terms of arrival, departure, sightseeing tours and meals. Their rooms need to be readied together in view of strict time parameters. Group rooming lists enable the HK department to organize their work and have the group’s room ready on time.

Crews in the house: Sometimes the arrival of a crew and the departure of another crew from the same airline may overlap. In such circumstances, it is important for the allotted rooms to be cleaned within a short period of time. Thus, for this, there should be effective coordination between front office and housekeeping.

▪ Flowers: sometimes the management extends its compliments to a guest with a special gesture of a flower arrangement in the room as recognition of the importance of a person. This requirement of flower arrangements for certain guests is conveyed to housekeeping by the front office on a daily basis.

▪ Apart from the above communications the front office needs to depend on housekeeping for the provision of clean uniforms to its staff.

Inter-Departmental Relationship with Maintenance

▪ The housekeeping department depends on maintenance to keep things in order.

▪ While carrying out their scheduled work, housekeeping employees may find some deficiencies in the hotel facilities, such as faulty electrical plugs, dripping faucets, leaking pipes or malfunctioning air-conditioning units etc.

▪ A need for urgent repairs is reported to maintenance over telephone and these requests are usually taken into action immediately.

▪ There are various heads under which maintenance work is done they are:

▪ Electrical work: air conditioning and heating; fused bulbs, lights and lamps that are not functioning; defective plugs and plug points; short circuits; and faulty geysers, refrigerators, and minibar fall under this category.

▪ Boiler work: this is necessary to maintain a supply of hot water to guestroom.

▪ Mechanical work: this entails repair or replacement of any faulty equipment, such as vacuum cleaners, ice-cube machines, and so on.

▪ Plumbing work: this deals with faulty faucets (taps), showers, drainage systems, water closets, and so on.

▪ Carpentry work: broken of shaky furniture; mirrors and cupboards in less than peak condition, and fresh woodwork are all part of this.

Inter-Departmental Relationship with Security

▪ The coordination here is mainly concerned with the prevention of fire and thefts and the safekeeping of keys and lost property.

▪ Housekeeping personnel should also report anything of a suspicious nature or movement in a hotel immediately to the security staff.

▪ Housekeeping has to coordinate if they see any anti-social activities in the guest room such as gambling, smuggling and so on.

▪ The security department is responsible for conducting training sessions on handling emergency situations for the staff. e.g they conduct fire drill to train staff to gear up in a fire emergency

Inter-Departmental Relationship with Stores

▪ Coordination with stores ensures the availability of day-to –day necessities of housekeeping.

▪ Larger hotels have a store attached to the housekeeping department that stocks linen, supplies and so on.

▪ Smaller hotels may stock them in the general store, except for linen, which is sent to the housekeeping department on purchase.

▪ Communication with stores is by way of a requisition form, which housekeeping sends to when it requires certain items. The requisition form is called as store requisition form.

Inter-Departmental Relationship with Personnel

Housekeeping coordinates with the personnel department for following reason

▪ Acquisition: human resource planning, recruitment, selection and induction/ socialization.

▪ Maintenance: compensation management e.g. pay/ salary, wages, over time, medical treatment etc.

▪ Motivation: performance appraisal system, reward management system and training and development.

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