How to Operate Effectively With Less Staff
There’s no doubt that COVID-19 has reshaped the way we do business throughout the hospitality industry.
Whether you’re an independent travel professional, work with an agency, travel operator, or otherwise, many of us have had to scale back our teams due to the decline in business caused by the pandemic.
It’s never the choice we would want to make, but it’s the reality of the situation. As we look towards businesses and cities reopening, and the travel industry starting to pick up steam, it’s important to consider how to best operate with less staff. We will all want to continue to do the best job for our clients, and it will be an uphill battle. Here are some strategies to get you started.
Assess Your Team
You may have had to lay off or furlough some team members, and are working with just yourself, or a smaller group to accomplish many of the same tasks. Take a look at your team and their strengths and weaknesses. It’s okay to reassign some responsibilities, and work towards the skills of your teammates. If that team member who was in charge of customer service before is really good over the phone, maybe they can be tasked with finding new business. Being nimble with your existing team will set you up for long term success.
Check In With Suppliers
Your relationships are the bread and butter of your business. As the lights start to turn back on, create a little Taskforce. Maybe it’s just you, or maybe it’s a small group of people. Your goal is to connect with all of your past suppliers and just check in. How are they doing? Are they still open? Has their capacity changed or do they have new blackout dates? What do they need from you? By ensuring that this personal touch comes early on and is a part of your workflow, you’re establishing yourself as a trusted and caring partner to those in the business. Once you gather their updated COVID-19 policies make sure to update your records so you can highlight these new safety policies in your upcoming proposals. Your clients will want to know the suppliers are taking this seriously, the more transparent you can be about social distancing protocol, and cleanliness policies the more comfortable people will be moving forward with your proposal.
Set New Goals
The reality is that it can be hard to do a lot with a smaller team. The other side of that is that business may indeed be a little slower, or at least more gradual as it ramps up. Set new goals. Maybe you were growing at a steady pace with your business, and the new goal is just to sustain. Create realistic goals, and then map out team responsibilities that can get you to those goals, and not overwork your entire team. It’s important to be mindful that your team may have also lost colleagues they loved to work with, or are just dealing with the emotional burden of Coronavirus, and reconfiguring what success looks like may allow them a little more space to do well without intense pressure.
Streamline Your Tools
The single best thing you can do to set your business up for success is to streamline everything that doesn’t require your incredible relationship-building skills. That means things like centralizing your information all in one place, having that information easily searchable, knowing exactly where everything is in terms of your workflow/pipeline, and creating dashboards so you have transparency across your team, as well as easy reporting. The good thing is, there’s a brand new tool that does all of those things and more called Reposite. Reposite was built for and with the travel industry, specifically for its needs, and with the goal of helping rebuild the industry after the pandemic. Things like tracking and renewals of key documents, managing and tracking payments, bulk emailing and email templates, and just a proper database to store all of your information
In the spirit of helping the industry, Reposite is available for free for the first group of users for the next year. If you’re interested in finding out more about Reposite, click here.
