Why Room Attendants should have Good Ethical Morals
Hotel room stewards, housekeeping staff, charladies, cleaners, their title will vary according to how much you have paid for your hotel room, but one thing is for certain - those hard-working people are expected to practice the highest ethical standards, in a number of respects and for a number of reasons.
The main reasons why hotel room stewards are expected to practice such good ethical standards are so that you will be happy to leave your hotel room in their care during your stay... and so you will be inclined to come back and stay at the hotel another time.
When staying in a hotel, most people will secure their valuables (jewelery, surplus cash, electronic equipment) in the little safe in the wardrobe. But the fact remains that they will also probably be leaving several hundreds of dollars worth of clothes, luggage and other personal property lying around the room every time they go down to the bar.
Hotel room stewards must practice the highest ethical code because the level of trust this implies on behalf of the guest is staggering. How many people would hand the keys to their home over to someone they have never met? But this is effectively what you do every time you leave your hotel room while on holiday or business. A stranger comes into your most intimate area, the place you have just slept, and rearranges it. That most of us do this without a second thought is a tribute to the high standards of ethics displayed by the overwhelming majority of hotel room stewards and professional cleaners.
If a room steward slips up even once to the temptation of pinching a cigarette from an open packet on the guest's desk, or having a quick squirt of the guest's perfume or aftershave in the bathroom, and that transgression is noticed by the guest upon their return... every shred of confidence the guest had in the entire hotel goes up in smoke in an instant, the illusion of trust is shattered, often forever. Occasionally, petty acts of larceny are committed by hotel cleaning staff, and hotel managers are merciless in firing the victims instantly - the risk to their business is incalculable.
So a hotel room steward must be above material temptation and respectful of private property at all times during their work, for the sake of the hotel, and certainly to protect their own employment.
In a similar vein, hotel room stewards must force themselves to be assiduous and diligent in their work, maintaining every hotel room to the same exacting standards every single day without fail. It is a demanding and pressured job to get a hotel's many rooms cleaned, tidied, and made up each day before guests start returning in the evening. The ability to cut corners and slack off is a mark of true intelligence and initiative in an employee, but this option is not available to a hotel room steward. They would not be quite human if they did not sometimes think: "Those sheets look pretty clean, let's just turn them over rather than changing them."
But they absolutely can not do this, because any lapse noticed by the guest will certainly result in them never staying again at the hotel, and bad-mouthing poor cleaning standards to friends and associates. And even though many people will go weeks without changing their bed linen, you can guarantee that any guest, no matter how scruffy would notice any corners that had been cut in their room's daily sprucing...
Hotel room stewards have to practice good, if not exceptional ethical standards because although many hotel guests will never even meet the person responsible for their room's upkeep, the room is usually the most important part of a hotel trip. The spotty boy on the front desk, the clumsy waiter, the expensive bar that closes too early, these are all annoyances, but if the room is rubbish, there is absolutely no way the guest is ever going to return. The burden of expectation falls squarely on the shoulders of the room steward, and their ethical behaviour must match their guest's expectations.
And for the stewards in question, not only are they protecting their employer's integrity and their own career through practicing good ethical standards, but they are also increasing the chances of making some good tips at the end of the week...
