Most hotels have procedures. Far fewer have procedures that change what happens on a shift. The gap is almost always in the writing, not in the team.
It describes the outcome instead of the steps
"Ensure the room meets the required standard" is not a procedure. "Clean the bathroom in order: mirror, basin, bath or shower, toilet last, then floor" is. If a sentence cannot be performed, it belongs in the quality standard section, not in the procedure.
It has no escalation route
Every procedure meets a case it did not anticipate, usually at the worst possible hour. A procedure without a named escalation route forces the employee to invent one, and the invented route is the one that produces the incident report. State who is called, for what, and how urgently.
Nobody can tell which version they read
An undated procedure in a shared folder is unverifiable. Give every procedure a version number, an author, an approver, an effective date and a review date, keep the previous versions readable, and ask people to acknowledge each new version. Then a manager can answer the only question that matters during an audit: who had read the version that was in force.
It was written by someone who does not do the work
A procedure written in an office and handed to a department is usually missing a step the department cannot skip. Write the draft with the people who perform the task, walk it with them once, and correct it before publishing rather than after the first failure.
A test before publishing
Hand the draft to someone who has never done the task and ask them to follow it exactly. Every question they ask is a missing step.
SOP Hotel Operations Quality