When the Way of Working Becomes a Standard: Why Processes Matter in Hotels

In every hotel, there are activities that are carried out almost automatically every day.

Preparing a department before guests arrive, checking a room, handling a reported issue, checking inventory, organising a service or dealing with an unexpected situation.

Over time, those who perform these activities gain experience and develop their own way of working. The problem arises when that method exists only in the mind of the person applying it.

If a procedure works because one person knows how to carry it out, is there really a standard?

When individual experience becomes part of the organisation

Employee experience is one of the most important resources of a hotel.

Someone who has worked in the same department for years knows its timing, priorities, exceptions and small practical details that are difficult to learn in just a few days.

This knowledge has great value. But it can also become a point of vulnerability when it is not transferred to the organisation.

A new employee may receive different instructions depending on who is training them. The same activity may be carried out differently from one shift to another. A procedure that is perfectly understood by a manager may become difficult to reconstruct when that person is absent.

The goal, therefore, is not to eliminate individual experience.

It is to ensure that what the hotel has learned over time does not remain exclusively tied to individual people.

From habit to procedure

Many activities become routine long before they are formally defined.

“We’ve always done it this way” may work as long as the team remains stable and everyone knows their role. But when new people join, volumes increase or the organisation changes, what once seemed obvious suddenly needs to be explained.

This is where standardisation takes on a practical meaning.

Defining a standard means establishing how an activity should be carried out, which steps are required, who is responsible for it and what result is expected.

Not every operation requires rigid and detailed procedures. But activities that are frequently repeated or affect service quality, costs and organisation can benefit from shared guidelines.

In this way, the functioning of a department depends less on individual memory and more on a method that can be recognised and followed throughout the organisation.

A standard should not make service impersonal

In the hospitality industry, the word “standardisation” may seem to conflict with the personalisation of the guest experience.

In reality, it mainly concerns what happens behind the scenes.

One guest may have completely different needs from the guest in the room next door. But the process through which a request is received, communicated to the correct department, handled and verified can be organised.

The same applies to room inspections, inventory checks, maintenance activities and many of the recurring operations carried out across different departments.

The standard applies to the process; the service can continue to adapt to the individual.

Making know-how accessible

This principle can also be found in the material describing the early stages of ESC’s development.

The project was created with the aim of digitalising operational activities and supporting the development of internal standards within the hotel. Ing. Jan Vlasák, MBA, CEO and General Manager of the Bonfanti Design Hotel, particularly emphasises the importance of keeping the hotel’s know-how within the system, so that procedures and standards remain available even when staff turnover occurs.

In this case, digitalisation is not simply about replacing a sheet of paper with a screen.

It is about making operational information accessible, shareable and available when it is needed.

A procedure can be documented. A task can be assigned. A check can be recorded. A new employee can have a clear reference without having to reconstruct the method every time through informal instructions.

The process comes before the tool

Digitalising an unclear procedure does not automatically make it better.

First, it is necessary to understand how it is actually carried out.

Which steps are necessary? Where do doubts or different interpretations arise? Which activities depend too heavily on the experience of a single person? Which information needs to be available so that employees can act correctly?

Only after answering these questions does it make sense to decide what should be standardised and which tool should be used.

This is also where the work of ESC Agency comes in: observing how the hotel actually operates, identifying the processes that need to be better organised and developing solutions that reflect the specific characteristics of the hotel.

Because a useful standard is not created simply by writing down a procedure.

It is created when the best way of performing an activity stops belonging to one person and becomes part of the organisation’s shared knowledge.