What do Hospitality Staff Have to Offer?

In these difficult times for hospitality, which may take years to recover fully, there are hundreds of thousands of staff looking for new roles - what can hospitality staff do for your business?

I had twenty years as a hotel GM before switching to running a shopping centre as I fancied a change - hospitality staff can pivot with ease, give them a look when the applications land.

Crisis Management

Crises in hospitality are not often life-threatening (but they can be) and happen all the time. One thing that struck me when moving from hospitality to the shopping centre environment was that people didn't often understand what a crisis really was as they hadn't had much practice. Hospitality staff practice crisis management on a small scale every day and on a larger scale often. I have literally lost count of the number of times a delivery hasn't turned up for a Christmas lunch, pipes have burst taking out a whole hotel floor, power has failed to the hotel, the boilers have packed up, a customer has been shot in a hotel room (OK, that's just once), drug overdoses, medical emergencies, mental health emergencies...a hotel or restaurant is only ever one very small step away from a crisis.

My point here is that hospitality staff take this stuff in their stride, they just get on with it, they rarely freeze, they think logically on the whole and are solutions-focused. This crisis management then transfers to better day-to-day decision making on the 'normal' stuff.

Resilience

Customers can be sods. I say that again, some customers can be sods. Irrational, lacking in understanding, angry, unforgiving sods for what appears to be no fault of the venue. That said, the vast majority are nice! Resilience is something that you gain at a very early stage in any career in hospitality. You learn it's not normally about you, you learn how to deal, how to calm and how to turn around. You learn how to go home and have a good walk with the dog and do it all again the next day, often with the same sheepish customer that you've now made a respectful relationship with. If not, you've learned to walk away with a harder shell.

Customer Perspective

Customers are telling you what they like and don't like all the time. You are a moving, living, breathing survey of their opinions and emotions and soak up exactly what they need all the time. They become adept at feeding back information to supervisors, managers and Boards to improve, iterating daily to be the best version of themselves.

Customer Engagement

The customer inevitably comes back for the experience, the engagement and put bluntly, the staff. You can invest ￡millions in infrastructure and have it sit as a heartless shell, put a good hospitality team in the dumpiest of dumps and you can make it shine. Hospitality staff learn all the tricks at an early stage to get the customer engaged - a key metric for any business and easily transferrable.

Profit Margin

Hospitality margins are tight, very tight. Staff know how to look after the pennies so that the pounds look after themselves. This is ingrained from the earliest days in the kitchens to the management by minute from the supervisors to the budgeting by pence in room yields. They know what profit looks like and are used to sharing in it, maybe not with share options but with a free beer they've earned at the end of a hard shift.

So before you cast off a hospitality application as low-skilled and question what can they offer your industry or sector, think carefully. Just one caveat though, the hospitality sector will want them back at some point so treat them well!