Setting Goals for Your Housekeeping Staff

Cleaners

Published on March 5, 2019

Learn how to set achievable goals for housekeeping staff with Polo & Tweed's 'SMART' approach for improved efficiency while boosting moral in your housekeeping team. Click To TweetDo you struggle to get your housekeeping staff to be more effective in their work, or notice tasks are forgotten or dropped? Are you setting goals for your Housekeeping staff?
Setting goals for housekeeping staff is of the utmost importance for a smooth workflow that will keep housekeepers on track and focused. When you have a housekeeping team that has to repeatedly do the same tasks for a long time, they get stuck in a routine. Motivate your housekeeping staff by setting goals so they can focus on something new.

If you set clear goals for your housekeeping staff, it will give them a new sense of structure to tackle problems. You’ll find the team works more efficiently. The quality of their work improves. And they better job satisfaction, too. After all, a happy team is a great team that will last!

How To Set Goals To Improve Work Quality

A great way you can implement a system of goal setting is to use the ‘SMART’ system. This stands for:

Specific

Measurable

Attainable

Relevant

Time-Based

A lot of information is in these five words already. First of all, when you are setting goals for your housekeeping team, be specific. If your instructions are too generic, like simply saying, ‘work faster’. Your staff may not understand how to achieve that goal and ask: ‘how fast is faster?’. It’s much more productive if you phrase this specifically by saying something like this. ‘Try and finish the bathroom cleaning in 1 hour instead of 2 hours’.

This way you are being clear, specific, and you’ll avoid confusion among your housekeeping staff.

Let’s use this example for the other four SMART words.

Measurable:

By giving your staff a clear timeline, the 1-hour slot. Your staff can instantly measure if they successfully achieve their goal. In our work, we all need some sort of measure of success. So having that clear 1-hour slot for them to count can help them see whether they’re achieving the goal.

Attainable:

Is 1 hour realistic? We’ve just used this number in this article as an example. But you’ll have to make sure that whatever goal you set is attainable and achievable. You cannot ask for the impossible. If you know that cleaning the bathroom takes more than an hour. Then assigning them an unrealistic goal to finish the job in an hour will only be counterproductive. It’ll demoralise housekeeping staff. And they won’t be motivated.

Relevant:

The time taken to clean a bathroom is highly relevant to housekeeping staff and their day-to-day job. So this goal can be important in making improvements. What you don’t want to do is to set goals with too few details, or assign goals that aren’t at all relevant to your housekeeping team.

Time-Based:

Our bathroom cleaning example is perfect in this way as it gives a clear indication of time-based management for the housekeeping team. Staff that is given time-based goals are given something to aim for with a target deadline.

How can Polo & Tweed Housekeeping Training Help?

The Polo & Tweed Housekeeping training is much more than learning how to clean and all the housekeeping techniques. It is definitely a significant part of the training. But many of the housekeeping training modules focus on precisely how to be more efficient and structured. As well as how to achieve set goals.

Even after reading this article, you might struggle to come up with suitable goals to set for your team, or maybe you are unsure of how to implement those goals. Our Housekeeping trainers offer Observation Days, for which a trainer shadows housekeeping staff for a set period of time while on the job at your house, hotel, or establishment. After the visit, a detailed feedback document and proposal will be created; listing the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in your current set up and organization, as well as advice on how training can improve this. You’ll be given a detailed training plan with custom-made training solutions, which can include goal setting, and how to manage and implement the goals.

Observation days allow you to not worry about what is wrong. The trainers will do all the analyzing for you! You also won’t have to worry about the training aspect as this will all be set up for you. The trainer will be there to guide you on implementing new goals, structures, and plans for your housekeeping team so they can grow and become more efficient for your household, hotel or establishment to flourish.

Get in touch with our training team here to discuss our housekeeping job training options.

We look forward to help you set effective goals for your housekeeping staff soon!

12 comments

  1. Lisa Johnson says:

    Hi, I have a team leader in housekeeping who would like to take up some extra training for her role – what would you recommend?

    • mm LucyChallenger says:

      Hi Lisa! Thank you for your question. We can provide tailor-made training for your team leader, and mix and match the modules to suit the specific needs, or we would be delighted to welcome them to our group housekeeping training which covers all our modules – please do give me a call on 0203 858 0233 and myself or my team would be delighted to discuss how we can best help you. Thank you.

  2. Kukumara Malebane says:

    Please can you please send me smart objectives for a housekeeping manager and how to lead housekeeping staff?

    • mm LucyChallenger says:

      Hello! Thank you for your message. We recommend you explore our free advice hub which has lots of great articles and information to help you. If you’d like further support we have private training options which we would be happy to speak to you directly out. Thank you!

  3. Jacqueline purdie says:

    Hi I’m a team leader & struggling with my team to get them to do certain tasks like job off the day & to keep standards & finish on time .can you send me some smart objectives for housekeeping
    Regards Jackie

    • mm LucyChallenger says:

      Hi Jackie, thank you for your comment. It sounds like you might need support with a new rota or schedule? Our deep housekeeping checklist might also be of help? We also have another free download here. There are lots of essential equipment your team will need – do they have them all? Hopefully these articles will help you and your team, and if you need further support, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us as we can offer private and bespoke training options for you and your team. Good luck!

  4. Mainuddin khan says:

    hi , i need 10 goal set for our housekeeping supervisor to improve their quality of work and efficiency

    • mm LucyChallenger says:

      We can certainly help with all your training – please do get in touch with us on +44(0)203 858 0233 and we’d be delighted to speak further about your training needs.

  5. Ibrahim abdulrahman says:

    That’s a nice post.

  6. Jovesa Nawalu says:

    Yea I’m just one team leader that’s struggling

    • Aafke Meelen says:

      Sorry to hear this Jovesa! Might it be that you are overworked, or have too many tasks? Could you delegate more, or maybe you need another team member? Perhaps some extra training for yourself might help too – have a look at our selection of training options on our website here, and perhaps we can help!

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