Random Checks

When I travel for business or leisure, I expect a clean, comfortable, and quiet room. Once when checking into a hotel, I found something alarming. Lifting the toilet seat just minutes after entering my guest room, I noticed that it wasn’t clean. Will spare you the details but I’m sure I’ve made my point. When a guest sees this, their immediate reaction is to question how thoroughly the room was cleaned. This may be the only instance of incompletion of job duties, but the perception is that this person is careless in all rooms and with all their work.

In a more general sense, a supervisor can come to the same conclusion. Even the best supervisor cannot walk in a direct report’s shoes all day long. This is true, probably because they have their own shoes in which to walk, or they wear different sizes. Therefore, if you are the staff person, you must ensure that all aspects of your work are done carefully and without error. And if you are the supervisor, you want to encourage the same understanding. Remind the associate that you are going to make your impressions based on what you observe, even if only a random sample.

My Performance Management clients tell me that sometimes it’s hard to know what is being accomplished so we create random sample checks of their work in the performance objectives. In this manner, the direct report should be working at completing all work with as minimal error as is humanly possible.

With random checks, strive for excellence always!

In my scenario, we were only staying at this hotel for one night and the manager apologized and offered some money off my night’s stay. He also said that he would be speaking with the housekeeping manager and the employee about this infraction. It was some consolation. Hopefully, he also asked the employee to state what the impact was on lost revenue and a dissatisfied customer so that they would consider this more carefully in the future.