Interpersonal Communication Reflection
Dear Brad and fellow classmates,
In this post, I will be sharing an interpersonal communication problem that occurred during my part-time work as a housekeeping supervisor. When I first became a housekeeping supervisor, I found it very stressful as a lot of responsibility was on my shoulder. As a result, I tend to be very short tempered at times. It was still very ambiguous for me on how a leader should communicate to his/her employees.
There was a time when I needed to call for a room attendant to redo some of the cleaning in the room as it was not done according to brand standards. At 2pm, I listed his mistakes and told him that I will be back by 2.30pm to release the room. I conveyed the message to him in an authoritative tone as I wanted him to get the job done as soon as possible. At 2.30pm, I went back and found out that he did not complete the job as told. The system indicated that the guest will be arriving at 3pm. I confronted the room attendant; however, he was unwilling to do so immediately. With the help of a senior supervisor, the room attendant followed up on what to do before 3pm.
The root causes of why he was acting this way could be the following: (1) Earlier on when I was pointing out his mistakes, I might have been too aggressive and rude. I did not consider his feelings. (2) He has a lot of work to do at the moment and cannot assign time to do what I told him to.
If you were in my predicament, what could have been done better so that the whole situation could have been effectively resolved? I look forward to hearing from you all.
Warm Regards,
Kelly
Hi Kelly!
ReplyDeleteI can totally relate to you because I was once a housekeeping supervisor trainee. I understand the amount of workload and responsibility may be too overwhelming for us at such a young age. Other than changing the way you speak, you may want to understand his/her schedule. You can negotiate and seek their opinion on whether he/she is available to clean the room in the next 30 minutes which helps you to better arrange for alternative solutions.
Based on my experience, I will personally help them to touch up the room if it is a minor mistake. If more work is required to meet the standards, I will ask the assigned room attendant along to quickly do up the room. Each of us will be in charge of different areas to speed things up. Otherwise, I will seek advice from the senior supervisor to ask if there are other room attendants available to clean the room.
Anyway, good job Kelly! It is not easy to handle incident like this as we still lack of experience in the industry.
Regards,
Xenia
Hello Kelly!
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing your experience as a supervisor trainee. I used to be a room attendant. From my experience, during the initial stage of my training, I was struggling to finish up doing all the assigned rooms to me. Sometimes, this would even go past my working hours. Hence, it gets frustrating when I get called back to do up the room again by the supervisor. However, I understand that by calling me back, the supervisor is able to show me my mistakes and that is a way for me to improve myself. However, this callback usually happens when I am in the middle of cleaning another room so I would usually finish up the room first before going back. However, this increases the likelihood of me forgetting about it, especially if I have many rooms left.
In my opinion, given how he had only half an hour between the time you informed him and the time you said you will be back to check on the room, he might have been in the middle of doing up another room. What I would suggest is perhaps to ask him how many rooms does he have left to understand his situation better and to see if he requires additional help. It is also important for you to highlight why are you rushing him and why is the task so urgent. It would help if he knows where you are coming from.
Thank you.
Best regards,
Shyartini
Thank you, Kelly, for sharing this scenario. In it you give relevant details in terms of the problem issue. I appreciate the feedback you've received, though no team gave you a critique based on the problem resolutions scenarios discussed in class (DRB technique, Thomas-Killmann conflict mode instrument). As the second part of this assignment, you should have done the same , but you haven't amalgamated the ideas from your classmates with info from the unit on conflict resolution. In that sense, you haven't completed the assignment.
ReplyDeleteCheers,
Brad