18. Empowering Our People to Thrive

September Focus: Empowering Our People To Thrive

One of the four pillars of success for my Future of Hospitality initiative is having thriving people. For me this starts with our leaders thriving so they can encourage their teams and so on, creating the ripple effect, like a stone bing thrown into water.

The monthly Future of Hospitality web event held on Tuesday this week focused on this very subject and we had a great conversation about the challenges and some of the opportunities and solutions we can incorporate into our strategies.

The four pillars of success for the Future of Hospitality initiative are that we develop:

1. Thriving People
2. Thriving Businesses
3. Thriving Communities 
4. Thriving Nature

So, through September my intention is to write newsletters, daily posts and do some LinkedIn Live videos all about how we can help our people thrive. 30 days of opportunities to follow the conversation, support or challenge some of the views and see by the end of the month whether we’ve been able to take this conversation further and share ideas & strategies out there to be tried and tested as you see fit.

Lessons learnt from covid & staff walking away 

We now know that many staff left our industry because they didn’t feel like their well-being was very high up the agenda, and in many cases, they believed it wasn’t even on the agenda.

And for many businesses, those staff weren’t far wrong. We had an abundance of available staff which meant the employers held the advantage and staff didn’t.

The tables have turned. There are now more positions than staff to fill them. 

Those employers who focus on inspiring, encouraging and empowering their staff to thrive are more likely to attract and retain great staff, no matter what the labour market is like.

We lost a huge amount of knowledge and experience from our industry when so many, often long-serving staff, who, probably for the first time in their careers, stopped to smell the roses (because they were made to) and ended up liking not working huge hours, weekends, and often unsocial hours. So they made decisions not to return. 

Happy staff are more likely to do better work.

Staff who feel valued and respected are more likely to commit to the employer, do better quality work and stay longer.

Teams who know there’s a focus by their employer on them thriving are more likely to work together to achieve what’s required of them.

Think for a moment what it must be like to work in an environment that’s the opposite of this. Why would anybody stay any longer than it takes to find alternative employment?

Work-life balance

We’ll talk more about this through this September series of newsletters and posts but rest assured we’ll discuss this really important issue. And not just for staff, but for everybody and that includes you too.

Learning & development

There’s been a lot of research post covid suggesting that staff want to be invested in more. They want training to develop their skills and capabilities for the roles they do. That sort of suggests we were under-training staff previously, not giving them the level of training and development they needed to feel like they were…valued and respected.

Career progression

With so many staff including managers leaving our industry so quickly, many employers have promoted aspiring leaders possibly before they’re truly ready. This means the learning and development issues are even greater for these roles, but often forgotten are those who are managing these teams, whether an owner or GM in an independent business or an area manager in multi-site groups. 

These leaders have had to very quickly realise they have to operate differently and often, learn new skills themselves. New ways of guiding and leading their direct reports.

Now, in the larger multi-site groups this could be aided by reducing he number of venues area managers look after so they can spend more time with each manager, but we’re operating in times when CFOs are more likely to be raising in their senior exec team meetings whether venue to area manager ratio can be increased!

Coaching skills are definitely in great demand, enabling leaders to get the best out of their teams, rather than some of the old-fashioned management methods!

So much more to cover 

And, for each aspect of our people thriving, I’ll get into more detail so that we can chunk down into some of the granular aspects of hospitality leadership.

I hope you enjoy this September deep dive into Thriving People as explore this pillar of the Future of Hospitality. In October I’ll move the focus to Thriving Businesses and do a similar deep dive.

David Carruthers

Founder, Future of Hospitality

#hospitality #leadership #thriving #futureofhospitalitywithdc