Housekeeping Risks and Hazards

The housekeeping department plays a crucial role in maintaining the cleanliness and safety of hotel rooms and public areas. However, it also comes with several risks and hazards, such as heavy physical workload, exposure to chemicals, and slips trips. This document highlights these risks and provides measures to mitigate them, ensuring the health and safety of housekeeping staff.

Housekeeping

Table of Contents
B- ACCOMMODATION:...............................................................................................................3
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................5

B- ACCOMMODATION:
Housekeeping is operational department in hotels who provides facilities to customer 24
hours, they provide services for cleaning, serving and maintain public area back area, foods,
beverages and services such as laundry, club spa as per customer demand (Chiang and Liu,
2017). They are also clean lobby area, lifts, parking, swimming pool, coffee shop, toilets. They
also washing floors, removing stains. They keep up the hotel with classy interior decoration. All
these types of work housekeepers can doing in hotels.
There is huge load on the hotel housekeeping staff, they worked on various levels such as
supervisory level, operational level (Lie,2015).
The housekeeping creates the first impression about the hotels in guest minds, we can say
that housekeeping is the heart of the hotels business.
Risk factors in housekeeping:
The main risk for housekeeping are:
1. Heavy physical worked load, which are high risk for back injuries.
2. Force-full upper limb motion, which are high risk for neck, shoulder and arms injuries.
The housekeeping worked every three seconds while cleaning a room, it’s very physically
demanding and tiring.
Sometime workers get going to injuries but they still worked. Its very harm-full for workers on
hotel.
Hazards for housekeepers:
Following are the hazards for housekeepers: 1. Exposure to chemicals in cleaning
products, including skin reactions or respiratory illnesses, 2. Exposure to biological infectious
diseases from soiled linens, uncapped needle and/or bodily fluids, 3. Slips trips and falls, 4.
fatigue and other health problems from shift work or long hour works, 5. Working alone, 6.
Manual handling of equipment - vacuums, carts (Leggett, 2016. ).
Ways to reduce risk and hazards for housekeepers:
Hotels are designed for comfort for guests and housekeepers, housekeepers are not guests
but they still worked there, so we fully responsible to their comfort. So they can work
comfortably without any hazards (Delp and Riley, 2015). Housekeepers wear proper protective
cleaning equipment when handling cleaning products, wash hands time to time, always wear
personal equipment for the task, wearing shoes with non-skid soles, knowing emergency contact

number and keep that immediately available, avoid slippery areas (Van der Wagen and
Goonetilleke, 2015).
Health and safety policy- The health and safety policy determine that policy for worker who
worked in seven days of week, to give them safety security, these policies provide to maintain
food safety and hygiene, to identify hazards and procedure to control them(Nelson, 2017). All
new staff receive all the policy and all the staff apply terms and conditions. They are also
providing hospitality to staff, Emergency service for staff, take care of all the staff and trying to
keep safe (Prayag and Hosany, 2015).
Health and safety legislation: There are some acts for housekeeper or workers who worked in
hotels.
Health and safety at work Act 1947- Health and Safety in Employment Act 1992, Health and
Safety in Employment Regulations 1995, Safety, Health and Welfare-at Work Act 2005, Health
and Safety at Work (General Risk and Workplace Management) Regulations 2016. Acts of these
aims to provide health and safety of persons at work and its legal act for all the worked persons
(Pan, 2015). It will help to employers and other duty holder to manage employers safety and
health.

REFERENCES
Books and Journals
Chiang, C.F. and Liu, B.Z., 2017. Examining job stress and burnout of hotel room attendants:
internal marketing and organizational commitment as moderators. Journal of Human
Resources in Hospitality & Tourism. 16(4). pp.367-383.
Delp, L. and Riley, K., 2015. Worker engagement in the health and safety regulatory arena under
changing models of worker representation. Labor studies journal. 40(1). pp.54-83.
Lie, A.L., 2015. The Impact of Occupational Stress Factors to Job Stress in Housekeeping
Department of Hotel ABC. iBuss Management. 3(1).
Nelson, E. and et.al., 2017. Developing Trust in the Housekeeping Staff at the Hilton St. Louis
Airport. Journal of Critical Incidents. 10.
Pan, F.C., 2015. Practical application of importance-performance analysis in determining critical
job satisfaction factors of a tourist hotel. Tourism Management. 46. pp.84-91.
Prayag, G. and Hosany, S., 2015. Human resource development in the hotel industry of
Mauritius: myth or reality?. Current Issues in Tourism. 18(3). pp.249-266.
Van der Wagen, L. and Goonetilleke, A., 2015. Hospitality Management, Strategy and
Operations. Pearson Higher Education AU.
Online
Leggett, A., 2016. How the ‘Health and Safety at Work Act’ Affects the Hospitality Industry
[Online]. Available through: <https://www.intuto.com/health-and-safety-work-act-2015/>