Housekeeping supervisors at La Quinta Holdings oversee the largest department at their hotels. Their job is to effectively and actively lead the team that takes care of La Quinta’s product, its source of revenue: the guest room. What they do has a tremendous impact on the success of La Quinta’s hotels.
In December 2014, the company launched its LQ Academy for executive housekeepers. This two-day training event focuses on leadership and developing of housekeeping supervisors. These high-potential team members become executive housekeepers at the end of the Academy.
Program Details
Candidates are selected based on their certification level in the room cleaning process, as well as an extensive nomination process with the general manager and regional vice president.
To set executive housekeepers up for success, their general managers hire a replacement for the housekeeping supervisor before he or she attends the Academy. This ensures that the candidate can hit the ground running in his or her new role as executive housekeeper after graduation.
The format for the LQ Academy is a new experience for its housekeeping supervisors—it blends classroom training and interactive learning via hands-on activities and role-plays of real-world situations. General managers take the training with their housekeeping supervisors to ensure that they use the same approaches when developing team members back at their properties.
Training modules include leadership, coaching and feedback, and effective training methodology, as well as many of the measurements tracked in the hotel industry. Housekeepers have an opportunity to practice communication with their managers in a structured setting, and they participate in role-plays to further improve their communication with their team members.
In addition to the two days of classroom training and interactive learning, LQ Academy provides three months of focused follow-up and mentorship. The follow-up takes the form of monthly Webinars and quizzes tracked through La Quinta’s learning management system, as well as individual mentorship calls where the executive housekeepers have one-on-one conversations with their assigned trainer/mentor. These conversations deepen the executive housekeepers’ understanding of leadership skills and further their sense of feeling prepared and connected.
La Quinta leverages the experience of its executive housekeepers who attended the Academy by inviting a “legacy” executive housekeeper to help facilitate future Academy sessions. This approach of “the field training the field” deepens participants’ experience and gives legacy executive housekeepers additional opportunities for visibility and career advancement.
Results
Working with the trainer/mentor, executive housekeepers establish hotel-specific goals in three primary areas where the housekeeping team can have the biggest impact:
- Product quality
- Reduction of problems in relation to room cleanliness
- Room attendant turnover
La Quinta track these metrics at participating hotels to determine the impact of LQ Academy to overall company success. The most recent class had a 0.6 percent increase in Net Promoter Score, 1.3 percent increase in room cleanliness, and 7.5 percent improvement in room attendant turnover.
La Quinta’s long-term plans are to leverage the successes of the LQ Academy for Executive Housekeepers and develop similar programs for front-line supervisors in the maintenance and front desk departments.
