Introduction
Team scheduling is the process by which the management in an organization defines a schedule that will be followed by employees. It specifies the specific time of the week when a certain team will be at work and the time that it will be off. It is a schedule that fixes different teams some specific days that they will be working every week and it has a specific period of time after which it starts repeating itself. A team or a number of teams are kept aside to relieve replace other groups when they have an off. The management assigns these duties and it has many advantages. This paper will seek to analyze team scheduling by drafting weekly staffing charts that can be used by a housekeeper in a hotel to manage the activities in his or her department.
Weekly Staffing Charts
Advantages of Team Staffing
Under team staffing, the manager in a hotel can schedule a certain team of individuals a task as if the team was a single entity. This helps save a lot of time because the process of scheduling each individual for a specific task is very long in a large hotel where there are many employees. The team system of staffing allows the grouping of individuals into several teams. This will increase the cooperation of employees and increase their morale than when they work as individuals in a large group of employees (Jones 47). When individuals are a group in small groups, each individual is likely to contribute because his or her impact can be seen. Under team scheduling, each team is assigned a specific place where it is supposed to work. The members of the team are likely to take care of all the cleaning functions in their area because they do not expect anyone to come to help. Again, the evaluation will be based on teams and not on an individual basis. Members of a team will work harder so as to promote their team.
Disadvantages of Team Staffing
The major disadvantage of scheduling is that it is quite expensive in terms of managing the teams and scheduling the tasks. This is because more employees are needed to supervise each group and to relieve employees. A negative-minded employee is likely to take advantage of team staffing and start coming late and being absent because he or she knows that the other individuals will still do the task.
Team staffing might not be very successful in other departments in a hotel especially the food production and the front office department. This is because individuals in these other departments are mainly professionals who have specialized to perform certain tasks and the departments have few individuals.
For a hotel that is unionized, it means that the members of the entire hotel have been working as one union. Team scheduling is likely to split individuals into different groups and this is likely to bring some problems because some individuals in the hotel might seem as if the management wishes to split the union. I would tell the union that team staffing is a good idea because it helps enhance work in the hotel and bring a good reputation at large. There are no intentions to break the union.
If occupancy fluctuates, I would reduce the number of individuals in a specific group and increase the number of groups so that each group can rest for more days.
From the schedule that was prepared, there is no group that got more than two consecutive days.
Conclusion
Team scheduling helps a housekeeper in a hotel manage the employees in his her department by grouping them into groups of a few individuals who are assigned a specific area where they will be working. It helps save time and increases the morale of employees and cooperation.
Work Cited
Jones, Thomas. Professional Management of Housekeeping Operations. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sins Inc., 2008.