7 Questions to Ask When Purchasing Hotel Labor Software

Budget season is upon us, and for many hoteliers, it’s a stressful time filled with making important decisions that will dictate the year ahead. Hotel leaders around the globe are crunching numbers, learning about new products, and deciding which technology companies to partner with for long-term success.

Exploring new hotel software for your properties can bring forth a range of questions. What key features should you look for? Which technology is going to give your properties the best support? Which offers the most ROI? We’ve already addressed the 5 Questions to Ask When Purchasing Hotel Operations & CapEx Software, but what about hotel labor software?

Labor is the single largest cost for every hotel budget, and optimizing your labor needs is not optional; it's required to sell rooms and stay profitable.

The right software should allow you to optimize labor expenses, improve staff productivity, and enhance overall operational efficiency. If you’re budgeting for new hotel labor software, this blog will help provide a framework to identify the key features and questions to ask during the process, ensuring you make an informed decision that provides optimal results for meeting your bottom line.

How Does the Software Optimize Labor Costs?

Over the past few years, the hospitality industry has faced significant labor challenges, from shortages to complex labor sourcing to a high demand for increased wages.

“Today’s high-salary, fewer-candidate market calls for a reevaluation of how hotels approach labor management, especially in a time where maximizing efficiency is critical to success.”- Lindsey Goedeker

Maintaining proper staffing levels while staying within budget can be time-consuming and frustrating. Using a hotel labor software such as Hotel Effectiveness by Actabl to schedule effectively and manage labor costs can significantly impact your bottom line.

Hotel Effectiveness uses current data from your payroll and property management systems to provide powerful data, allowing managers to focus on actionable insights to reduce labor costs while improving productivity and increasing hotel profits. Hotel Effectiveness empowers effortless decision-making and staffing adjustments, such as scheduling the correct number of hours for every position and avoiding costly overtime and excess contract labor costs.

In addition, labor planning, team scheduling, and budgeting with Hotel Effectiveness take less time than traditional methods, freeing up leadership availability to improve individual and team performance and focus on growing site revenue.

How Does the Software Simplify Employee Time Monitoring and Attendance?

Accurate time tracking is essential for managing labor costs. When seeking out hotel labor software, it is crucial to ensure it includes tools to streamline employee time tracking so your team can catch mistakes and improve efficiency.

Hotel Effectiveness simplifies time tracking, improves accuracy, and provides insights that can help you get control of your future labor costs and provide a clear view of actualized labor. This allows your leaders to easily view employee time clocks to track attendance, overtime, and breaks across the entire hotel or just contracted labor. As markets evolve with ever-changing labor challenges, it’s crucial to find a solution that can keep up with the unique personnel needs of your hotel. Hotel Effectiveness was built to handle the unique aspects of hotel payroll, including employees who work multiple positions, piece pay, gratuity, and more.

How Does the Software Enhance Employee Communication and Engagement?

Given that hospitality roles are often dispersed and staffing requirements are personalized for each facility, a quick and effective communication method is a must-have feature when looking for hotel labor software.

As hotels are still seeing a large number of open positions, we recommend a tool that also offers employee engagement features as an engagement strategy to help mitigate turnover.

The Mobile App and Employee Messaging within Hotel Effectiveness is the fastest and easiest way to engage with employees. Whether you are instantly sharing updates, news, and safety information, Hotel teams can use one platform for communications, scheduling, time-off requests, and wellness check-ins. Management can instantly share announcements or news company-wide or within a specific hotel.

Plus, they’ll have access to trackable communications, dedicated messaging channels, newsfeeds, reporting, and more time-saving benefits. One of the key drivers of employee engagement is a supportive communication model. Utilizing employee engagement technology to maintain relationships with your staff is key to ensuring longer-term employment and improving the overall employee experience. Be sure to look for a partner or leader who can support seamless communication among your teams.

How Does the Software Benchmark Wages and Help Attract and Retain Top Talent?

In the face of a worsening labor shortage, hiring and retaining affordable, quality talent is becoming increasingly challenging. For hoteliers, accurate wage data and benchmarking are indispensable and crucial aspects of hotel labor software. By leveraging data-driven insights, you can make informed decisions to improve operational efficiency and retain talent.

Hotel Effectiveness offers the most comprehensive hospitality wage benchmarking tool, providing wage information by position across nearly 100 markets. This user-friendly tool enables you to make informed wage decisions and set effective compensation strategies.

Curious about how your hotel measures up? Productivity Benchmarking is another key feature to watch for! With Hotel Effectiveness, you can benchmark your hotel’s performance against thousands of brand types and occupancy levels. This allows you to gain insights into productivity, staffing trends, and industry standards, ensuring timely adjustments and optimal workforce allocation.

How Does the Software Provide Real-Time Oversight of Staffing Performance?

No two days at a hotel are ever the same. While it’s crucial to step back and assess your overall labor performance, it’s just as vital that your hotel labor software can zoom in, in real-time. Real-time oversight is essential for managing daily operations and ensuring everything runs smoothly and efficiently.

Hotel Effectiveness arms hoteliers with on-property daily labor check-in tools to gain real-time oversight of staffing performance and costs, enabling swift adjustments of resources to determine daily operational success and ensure maximum efficiency.

How Well Does the Software Integrate with Existing Technologies?

Before introducing any new technology to your organization, it’s crucial to understand how it will work within your current ecosystem. At Actabl, we recognize the importance of seamless integrations for your success. With over 420 robust integrations, our software connects with hundreds of systems, bringing all your tools and data together seamlessly, ensuring you have everything you need to run your hotel efficiently.

The Hotel Effectiveness Revenue System integrates daily data entry and reporting of metrics like rooms sold, room revenue, and F&B covers by consolidating disparate systems into one platform. This ensures standardized and efficient operations across properties. Additionally, our Payroll Time Clock Integration (TimeSync™) works with systems like ADP or UKG, and integrates with dozens of payroll companies, Professional Employer Organizations (PEOs), and in-house software packages.

How Does the Software Facilitate Coverage and Shift Swapping?

Many hotels face an ongoing coverage crisis due to increased demand, limited labor pool, and the DOL’s overtime rule. Maintaining proper staffing levels while staying within budget can be time-consuming and frustrating. Managers often have to resort to costly overtime, contract labor, or the unfortunate costs of searching for great new employees. When seeking hotel labor software, it’s important to find a partner that makes the process of finding coverage as simple as possible.

CoverageFinder within Hotel Effectiveness allows managers to fill their schedules from the best source of labor: people who already work in their hotels! Amidst unpredictable occupancy and day-to-day demands, CoverageFinder reduces pressure on managers and saves them time every day. And the most timely element of all, it improves employee retention by enabling more scheduling opportunities, earning potential, and job variety without requiring any added lift from scheduling management.

Managers can activate cross-trained teams to cover staffing needs by posting open shifts or approving shift swaps, ensuring the team always shows up to work. Additionally, it enhances flexibility and employee satisfaction by allowing staff to have more ownership over their schedules, which supports the evolving market of today’s workforce’s desire for additional flexibility.

Why Actabl Labor?

There are a number of reasons why Actabl’s award-winning labor management solution empowers both corporate and on-property staff alike to navigate today's labor shortage and rising costs. Featuring an intuitive interface, Actabl Labor fosters expert-level understanding and seamlessly scales knowledge across the business, ensuring alignment internally and fostering clear lines of communication to maximize profits. But how is it demonstrably better? Actabl’s technology utilizes a powerful prediction engine, which matches employee schedules with labor plans, occupancy, and labor standards, improving operational efficiency and saving time and money across your entire hospitality portfolio.

Actabl Labor empowers above-property leaders with streamlined reporting, consolidating disparate data systems into one comprehensive view. This integration breadth provides real-time visibility into labor efficiencies, benchmarking them against industry standards and with your key competitors, facilitating data-informed decision-making.

If these 7 top reasons weren’t enough to pique your interest in Actabl Labor Solutions, take the time to see our product in action. Request a demo here and meet with our experts!