What We Expect Employees to Give and What It Takes to Give It

We always measure service through what guests receive. Isn’t that the common metrics? But let  me ask you this: how much attention do we give to what employees must manage to deliver it? 

A guest complains about the room. The receptionist listens, apologizes and finds a solution. A few minutes later, another guest arrives. The receptionist welcomes them with a smile. From the guest's point of view, nothing unusual has happened. Someone did their job. But let’s look at the interaction from the employee's side. 

They have just dealt with frustration, managed their own reaction, found a solution and moved  straight into another conversation. There is no pause between the two experiences. The next  guest expects the same attention, the same patience and the same quality of service. 

This is ordinary hospitality work. They are hired for that role. Right? 

And perhaps that is exactly why we underestimate it. 

A smile is not the same as an emotion 

One of the most interesting things about hospitality is that employees are expected to manage how they appear to feel while doing it. 

A difficult guest still deserves a professional response. A busy shift does not remove the  expectation to be welcoming. Personal frustration is not supposed to enter the guest  experience. 

This is what psychologists call this emotional labor. The concept was introduced by sociologist  Arlie Russell Hochschild who studied how people manage their feelings and expressions to meet  the demands of their jobs. 

Let me explain that there is a difference between feeling patient and behaving patiently. There is  also a difference between genuinely feeling empathy and knowing how to express it  professionally. Yes! Both require effort but they are not the same experience. 

Research published by Alicia Grandey connected emotional labor with emotion regulation,  showing how employees manage their internal feelings and outward expressions during work. 

This raises a question worth considering: How often do we evaluate the service an employee  provides without considering the emotional work involved in providing it? 

The brain does not work in separate departments 

Hospitality operations are divided into departments. Human behavior is not.

When an employee deals with a guest several things happen at once. 

They listen, interpret, remember, assess and respond. They read facial expressions and tone of  voice. They consider what the guest needs and what the organization allows them to do. They  may also be managing their own frustration or fatigue. 

All of this happens while the interaction is unfolding. 

The brain has limited attentional and working-memory resources. It cannot give unlimited  attention to every demand at the same time. 

This matters in an airline or a hotel where employees are constantly interrupted, switching  between tasks and responding to unexpected situations. 

Let’s consider a receptionist who is resolving a booking issue while answering the telephone  and responding to a colleague's question. The problem is not necessarily a lack of training or  commitment. The employee is dealing with several competing demands. 

Research into cognitive performance under stress has shown that acute stress can affect  working memory and cognitive flexibility. Shields and colleagues examined this relationship in a  meta-analysis. 

The practical point here is that people do not always think and remember or make decisions in the  same way under pressure as they do when they have time and space to concentrate. 

Yet hospitality often expects employees to deliver the same quality of judgement regardless of  how demanding the situation becomes. 

The real cost of asking people to always be pleasant. Yet! There is nothing wrong with  expecting professionalism. It is part of the job. 

The problem when organizations confuse professionalism with the expectation that employees  should absorb every difficult situation without any effect on them. 

An employee can remain polite while feeling exhausted. They can resolve a complaint while  carrying the frustration from the previous interaction. They can follow every service standard  while gradually losing the energy required to engage with people. The guest may never notice. 

But over time the stress builds up this can influence how employees approach their work. Psychological research distinguishes between two ways of managing emotions. 

Surface acting means changing the expression without changing the feeling. Deep acting means  trying to change the feeling itself.

Neither is automatically good or bad in every situation. However, repeatedly hiding emotions  can be demanding when employees have little opportunity to recover between difficult  interactions. 

This is why the conversation about employee performance needs to go beyond motivation. People can be committed to their work and still become mentally and emotionally depleted. Commitment does not remove human limits. 

What happens between one guest and the next? 

Here is something hospitality managers should pay more attention to: the space between  interactions. A guest complaint may take five minutes to resolve. But does the employee have  the opportunity to mentally move on before the next guest arrives? 

A difficult interaction does not always end when the guest walks away. The employee may still  be thinking about what happened, whether the problem was resolved or whether a manager  will question their decision. And that creates mental fatigue and attention cloudiness. 

It is worth looking at how shifts are organized, how employees receive support after difficult  incidents and whether operational systems allow them to focus on the next interaction. 

Sometimes a small change in how work is organized can matter more than another training  session. 

Not every problem requires employees to become more resilient. Sometimes the organization needs to make the work more manageable. 

Service quality is also a management decision 

We often discuss service quality in terms of employee behavior. 

Did the employee smile? Did they respond quickly? Did they use the right language? Did they  resolve the complaint? 

These questions are reasonable but they only show part of the picture. 

What was the workload at the time? How many interruptions did the employee manage? Did  they have the authority to solve the problem? Were they dealing with several emotionally  demanding situations in succession? 

These are management questions, not excuses for poor service. 

Research been done by Vashdi and colleagues on hotel employees found that the relationship  between emotional engagement and service performance was influenced by workload pressure. In other words, expecting employees to prioritize service is not enough. The  conditions in which they work also matter. 

A hotel can invest in excellent training and establish detailed service standards. But if its daily  operations leave employees with competing demands and little room to make decisions, the  results may not reflect that investment. 

The responsibility for service quality does not sit entirely with the person standing in front of  the guest. It also sits with the people who design the working environment. 

Perhaps we are measuring the wrong part of the experience 

Hospitality has become very good at measuring what can be counted. 

Waiting times, complaint rates, guest satisfaction, employee productivity and online reviews all  provide useful information. 

But there is another side of performance that is harder to measure: the mental and emotional  demands placed on the people delivering the service. This does not mean replacing operational  measures with psychological assessments. Of course not! It means asking better questions  when results are not where they should be. 

If service quality drops during busy periods, is it a training issue, a staffing issue, a workload  issue or a combination of several factors? 

If an employee becomes less attentive towards the end of a shift, what has happened  throughout that shift? 

And if a hotel wants employees to make better decisions, has it created an environment in  which they can think clearly and respond appropriately? 

These questions deserve a place in conversations about hospitality performance. 

References

Grandey, A. A. (2000). Emotion regulation in the workplace: A new way to conceptualize emotional labor. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 5(1), 95–110. https://doi.org/10.1037/1076-8998.5.1.95

Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press. https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520272941/the-managed-heart

Shields, G. S., Sazma, M. A., & Yonelinas, A. P. (2016). The effects of acute stress on core executive functions: A meta-analysis and comparison with cortisol. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 68, 651–668. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2016.06.038

Vashdi, D. R., Katz-Navon, T., & Delegach, M. (2022). Service priority climate and service performance among hospitality employees: The role of emotional labor and workload pressure. Cornell Hospitality Quarterly, 63(4), 504–518. https://doi.org/10.1177/19389655211029912