Knock Knock Housekeeping

I visited the United States for the very first time in the summer of 2014, not for travel but for work. There is program called J1 program or Summer Work and Travel program, which is specially designed for international students who are interested in American culture and willing to spend their summer working in America. So, I applied for the program, got few exams, passed few interviews, and flew to USA to work as a… housekeeper.

The following three months I was working in a resort located in Colorado. The main duty of housekeepers is, no doubt, keeping houses clean. Unlike those housekeepers I usually saw in hotels who work alone with a housekeeping cart, housekeepers in our resort worked as teams. The supervisors of housekeeping department assigned team arrangements every morning. Each team had a crew leader and four to five crew members. Before I became a crew leader, I didn’t feel much about how a team operates, I just did my jobs that my crew leader assigned to me. Yet I became a crew leader after working there for few weeks and started feeling the pressure of how to lead a team successfully and get jobs done.

According to the theories of B&D, our team was more like a dual authority team; I was the boss with five or six members and I usually split them into two groups. Though my crew members varied every day since they were randomly assigned to me, my management was the same most of time. There were few reasons why I split them into groups: first, wildcards in my group tended to make others feel upset when working together; second, I believed that people with different comparative advantages could work more efficient. In the beginning, I split my group randomly and sometimes put a lazy guy with a hardworking guy. It turned out that the hardworking guy was influenced by the lazy one and worked slowly together. Then I realized that I’d better put hard working guys together so they can motivate each other to work harder.  By doing so, I could at least have half team work efficiently. Moreover, I found that assigning my team according to their comparative advantages was a good idea to finish jobs faster. For example, some people liked to clean bathrooms and they could finish it faster than others, then I should assign them to clean bathrooms. I usually put a bathroom guy with another guy who was good at doing beds.

My strategy worked quite well because I gave each teammate reasonable work to be done, and awards were giving if they finished tasks earlier than the schedule, like longer breaks. Another reason that my strategy worked was because most of time our jobs are simple. We usually cleaned cabins or hotel rooms, where all crews were reachable and I could supervise them easily since we were either cleaning in the same cabins or few rooms away from each other in the hotels. However, there was an exception: cleaning yurts, which was most crew leaders’ nightmare. The layout of those yurts was scattered and made me hard to contact with or supervise my crew members efficiently. Sometimes I sent few crew members to clean yurts alone since I needed to clean public restrooms in yurts campground, and I came back finding that they were still cleaning the same cabin. In this case, the task was more complicated than clean cabins or hotels, then my crew became messy.

Maybe it was because I didn’t give them clear instructions about how much workload we got, or maybe it was because my crew didn’t have a common commitment on finishing the job. Either way, there was nothing I could do to improve those problems. Sometimes I did share the cleaning schedule that I got from supervisors with teammates, which I thought would be helpful for giving my crew an overview of how many work we have. However, supervisors didn’t stick with the plan, many times we finished the work earlier and were sent to do some extra works, such as help other crews. Then teammates who were “clever” enough knew that they should not finish jobs ahead of the schedule and did things slowly. What our supervisors did made the goal of our team unmeasurable and unspecific, and teammates lacked the motivation to finish work ahead of the scheduled time.

There was one time that I argued my supervisor to put all people from my country (4 people) in my crew, my supervisor did it but the schedule I got that day was quiet hostile. We got extremely large workload but it turned out that we finished works two hours ahead of the schedule. How so? In that case, our team structure was different. Our team was using all-channel network, teammates could all communicate with each other and we knew each other well so it didn’t take me much time to decide jobs allocation. For example, a girl was too good at cleaning bathrooms and I just let her clean about 25 bathrooms. Not only our goal was clear, to show mean supervisors that we were a good team; but we also have higher morale, no one wanted to work lazily even we knew that we could be assigned extra works.

 In short, it is necessary for managers to set clear and specific goals, which can motivate all team members to work on it. Awards can be given properly to increase incentives to work harder. If the situation is allowed, managers can assign jobs according to teammates’ comparative advantages to increase efficiency. On the contrary, teammates are required to know exactly goals and their own pros and cons, which can make themselves a good team player. Once team members understand what they are good at and what they are not good at, it helps them to connect themselves to jobs that are given to them. They can communicate with managers about what jobs they can accomplish better, so managers can lower the possibility of facing morale problems when assigning jobs. For example, a manager gives a job which is far beyond the employee’s ability, the employee tends to finish the job carelessly. I believe that great communication between managers and employees is the key to form a good team.

Have no idea why I wanted to take a picture with a vacuum.
(The sticker was put for privacy consideration)