Cornwall hotel flourishes despite lockdown fears

The Headland, a hotel in Cornwall, has saved the vast majority of its job roles.

Initially, the double five-star hotel was planning to make 80 staff redundant to financially cope with losses from the pandemic lockdown.

However, after the hospitality industry reopened in England on the 4th of July, the number of necessary redundancies was reduced to just 8.

This outcome was the result of a combination of many factors, including the Eat Out to Help Out scheme, the rise of UK staycations and the opening of the hotel’s new swimming and wellbeing centre, The Aqua Club.

Such is the increase in demand that there are 20 new vacancies, from general manager to seasonal bar staff.

Owner Carolyn Armstrong said, “Having worked closely with our team for over 40 years, it was incredibly upsetting to have to start the difficult process of asking for voluntary redundancies back in June.

While we are sorry to have to lose eight members of our team, we are relieved that 72 of the 80 at risk roles have been saved.”

She added, “We would like to thank our team for the patience, understanding and generosity shown during the lockdown, many of whom initially offered to job share in order to protect the livelihoods of their peers, whilst future proofing the business.”

Thanks to a profusion of temporary, agency and zero-hour staff in the hotel industry, many payroll departments are still struggling with paper timesheets and sign-in books, self-reported by staff.

These have many disadvantages, including employees losing or forgetting the pieces of paper. Fraud and mistaken information is also likely to occur with this format. Stories abound online about employees filling in timesheets for shifts they never attended, not to mention the lesser evil of falsifying timesheets to hide lateness.

Paper timesheets are also hugely inefficient for payroll staff – they need to be collected, filed, and then their information transferred manually into the payroll system.

Purchasing a workplace management system from Time and Attendance South West will solve these issues. If employees have to clock in at the clocking terminal before entering and leaving, there will no longer be any ambiguity about working hours and no need to sort through hundreds of timesheets at the end of the week or month.

Supervisors and managers can also check all of the timing data for their assigned team members easily within the software, which gets rid of squinting at bad handwriting, and also gets rid of the need to chase people up for handing them in late.

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