Executive housekeeper job description

The executive housekeeper leads the housekeeping department and is accountable for the cleanliness and readiness of all guest rooms, corridors and public areas. The role plans daily labor against the occupancy forecast, manages the departmental payroll and supply budget, maintains linen and amenity par levels, and develops a team of room attendants, inspectors, housepersons and laundry staff. The executive housekeeper reports to the rooms division manager or general manager and works in close coordination with the front office on room release and with engineering on out-of-order rooms.

Replace “guest rooms, corridors and public areas” with your actual scope. If laundry is on-premise, say so in the summary rather than burying it in the duty list — it materially changes who applies.

Daily operations. Review the occupancy and arrivals forecast, build the assignment board by room type, brief the team, monitor progress against expected finish time, reassign when someone calls out, release inspected rooms to the front desk, and close the shift with a minutes-per-room actual.

Labor and budget. Forecast weekly housekeeping hours from the occupancy forecast, schedule to that forecast rather than to habit, control overtime, approve payroll, track housekeeping cost per occupied room, and explain variance to the rooms division manager.

Standards and quality. Own the cleaning sequence and the minutes standard for each room type, run or delegate room inspections, act on guest cleanliness feedback, and prepare the department for brand and franchise audits.

Inventory. Maintain linen, terry and amenity par levels, run periodic linen counts, control condemned linen, and manage chemical and equipment purchasing within budget.

People. Recruit, onboard and train attendants and inspectors, run the ramp plan for new hires, hold safety training including chemical handling and bloodborne pathogens, manage performance, and keep turnover and absence within target.

Coordination. Daily contact with front office on room readiness and late checkouts, with engineering on maintenance defects found during cleaning, and with laundry or the outsourced laundry vendor on turnaround.

This is the part a generic HR template cannot tell you, because it depends on cleaning volume rather than on room count alone. A 120-room select-service property running mostly stayovers generates far fewer supervisory hours than a 120-room resort with suites and a deep-clean rotation.

Test it with arithmetic rather than a rule of thumb. If your inspection policy is every departure room, and an inspection takes six minutes, a 200-room hotel at 60 percent departure occupancy generates 120 departures × 6 = 720 inspection minutes, or twelve hours — more than one person’s shift before any budgeting, ordering or training happens. That is the moment the executive housekeeper stops inspecting and starts supervising inspectors. The staffing calculator runs that inspection-load math alongside the attendant plan.

• Several years in hotel housekeeping including time assigning boards and inspecting rooms.
• Demonstrated control of a labor budget: ask candidates for their minutes-per-occupied-room standard and how they defended it.
• Working fluency with a PMS for room status, plus a scheduling or timekeeping system.
• Practical knowledge of chemical safety data sheets, bloodborne-pathogen procedure and safe lifting.
• Language capability matching your team, stated honestly rather than as a preference.
• Physical requirements stated concretely: standing, walking floors, and lifting a specified weight.

Avoid requiring a hospitality degree unless your brand mandates it. It filters out strong internal promotions from the inspector bench, which is where most good executive housekeepers come from.

Set the target for each of these before the person starts. An executive housekeeper hired against “keep the rooms clean” will be judged on guest complaints; one hired against these five numbers can actually win the argument for more hours on a heavy departure day.

An executive housekeeper job description only works if the roles underneath it are defined too, otherwise every gap lands back on the department head. Pair this with the housekeeping supervisor job description, the room attendant job description and the laundry attendant job description. The full duty split across the department is in hotel housekeeping duties.