3 Hotel Safety Measures You Need to Take for Your Staff Right Now

As the pandemic continues, hotel tech that was once a luxury is now essential. Key examples include contactless hotel check-in, keyless entry systems, and cardless payment systems. Thankfully, guests only need a smartphone to use these systems, so almost every guest can use them to stay safe.

Unfortunately, the focus on guest safety is only half of keeping a hotel safe. Hotel tech teams need to keep staff safe, too, but what keeps guests safe doesn’t keep hotel staff safe. After all, staff members don’t need to check-in or make payments.

As you can see, hotel staff has different needs from guests. Here are three ways that tech can help keep your staff safe. Use this list as a springboard for your own ideas, and work with your staff to keep your hotel as safe as possible.

Let Staff Use Their Own Devices – Securely

You might normally ask hotel staff to use hotel-owned smart devices during work hours. However, in the context of a pandemic, this could be unsafe. If staff need to claim and return devices to a central device bank, this creates a bottleneck and could make social distancing difficult.

Instead, consider allowing employees to use their own devices at work. If you have mobile device management (MDM) software in place, this is easy. MDM software lets you create a safe virtual space on staff-owned devices, where any sensitive data stays secure.

You might worry that employees will take sensitive guest data home, putting that data at risk. Thankfully, the secure virtual device space can protect sensitive data. For example, staff cannot copy-and-paste secure data into personal social media apps or the like.

Set Up A Text-Based Emergency Broadcast System

Normally, if guests and staff hear a siren, they know to evacuate a hotel. While this is ideal in the event of a fire, this may be the exact opposite of what hotels need during a pandemic. Instead, hotels need ways to keep staff and guests isolated if there is a chance anyone was exposed to COVID-19.

You can use an MDM solution to set up emergency alerts on hotel-owned and staff-owned devices. These alerts can include both text and sound. Plus, admins can block all device activity until users acknowledge the message. This is a safe way of making absolutely sure that everyone stays up-to-date, lowering infection risk.

You can even use these alerts to keep guests safe, too. Guests can use their own devices for contactless hotel check-in, as well as keyless entry systems, but many hotels also provide in-room tablets for guests to use. You can broadcast emergency alerts to those tablets, keeping guests informed about the latest pandemic updates.

Make Sure Maintenance Teams Keep Devices Charged

Most staff can (and should) use their own devices during the pandemic, but this isn’t possible for every staff member. Maintenance workers often need specialty devices owned by their hotels, such as barcode scanners. It wouldn’t be possible for these workers to switch to using their own devices.

Even so, maintenance workers need to keep their dealings with guests as short as possible. This means any specialty devices must be ready to go whenever the need arises. Hotels can use an MDM solution to make sure the devices these workers need are ready for use at any time.

Using an MDM solution, hotel IT staff can remotely check device battery charge, and even remotely troubleshoot if needed. This way, maintenance staff minimize the chance of anything going wrong during repairs. Plus, IT staff can set automatic alerts if anyone tries to take hotel-owned devices out of the hotel, or compromise them in any other way.  

Next Steps

Hotel guests benefit from cardless payment systems, contactless hotel check-in, and other safety measures, but as we’ve seen, employees need innovative tech as well. The three measures we have explored – bring-your-own-device programs, text-based emergency alerts, and remote maintenance device upkeep – all have one thing in common. The right MDM solution makes it easy to put them in place.

SureMDM by 42Gears is equipped to help hotel staff in these ways, and many more. Hotels looking to show their commitment to safety should strongly consider implementing a solution like SureMDM, if they haven’t already. SureMDM makes this process easy with a risk-free 30-day trial.