Living Hospitality: Talent & Culture (6)

The hospitality industry faces persistent structural challenges, including low pay, demanding working conditions, seasonality, unsociable hours, limited career progression and poor work–life balance. Additionally, AI, labour mobility, economic pressures and employment uncertainty create new challenges that contribute to high employee turnover, increasing recruitment costs, loss of expertise, reduced operational efficiency and compromised service quality.During the “Great Uncertainty”, organisations must move beyond traditional engagement approaches, recognising that employees are more likely to care for guests when they feel cared for themselves.

Employee engagement depends on whether people feel secure, valued and respected at work. During the “Great Uncertainty”, hospitality employers need to give employees confidence that their effort will be recognised, fairly rewarded and supported.This starts with good working conditions, manageable workloads and decent salaries, particularly at the lower end of the pay scale.

The level of uncertainty in today's workplace is unprecedented. Social media promotes unrealistic lifestyles and income opportunities, causing many employees to question their current jobs and contributes to the "grass is greener" phenomenon.

A focus on employee well-being can translate to reduced turnover and burnout. Middle management needs to be provided training and education as well as experiences that enables them to be continually learning and growing. Managers and front-line leaders need knowledge, experiential learning opportunities, application practice time plus learning tools that focus on decision making to help create better work environments.

Supervisors and department heads are the bridge between executives and frontline employees. They may indeed be the most consequential leadership layer because they must translate policies, staffing decisions, service standards, and culture into actual workplace practices.

This is what happens when organisations treat people as numbers on a spreadsheet. Line and middle managers absorb some of the most demanding aspects of hospitality work: pressure from senior leaders and owners, the emotional needs of their teams, and the expectations, and sometimes unacceptable behaviour of customers.Good hospitality companies do exist, and many understand this reality.

I've long been a believer in the model - Happy Staff-Happy Guest- Profitable Business.My personal view is that this is where the real solution lies. As an industry we are reasonably good at measuring things. Although I don't believe we are as good as measuring the right things together.

Improving retention is certainly good news, but retention alone does not tell us whether employees are committed to their organizations. During economic uncertainty, some employees may practice “job-hugging,” staying primarily because changing jobs feels risky.

Building a hospitality business team means to create community not just jobs. Business and employee performance needs to focus on the delivery of great service and support the establishment of sustainable hospitality environments (good for the environment, good for the community and good for business).

Hospitality’s growing role as a talent pipeline for luxury retail, private healthcare, wealth management and the wider experience economy reflects not a failure to produce people, but the opposite: the industry develops highly transferable capabilities that many other sectors now actively seek.

The hospitality industry and its education arm have been fighting the battle for business credibility for many years. We “hospitality” has typically been seen as offering jobs on the way to something better, a specialty function that anyone can do.

This is proof that human connection - critical to a guest experience in a hotel or resort - is everlasting. Neither AI nor Covid 19 can take down the power of the "emotional human touch" of welcoming people into our establishments.

As the technologist in the room looking through the lens of the melding of industry workforce and the application of technology, I find this development curious for a number of reasons:AI Singling Out: It's interesting to see the specific technology of AI singled out.

The recent court ruling highlights an important principle: AI adoption should not be a labor replacement solution. The more meaningful question is how AI can help employees work smarter, more efficiently, and ultimately more effectively.Hospitality has always been a people-centered industry.

Hospitality has never been just about systems, processes or efficiency. It has always been about people. The ruling highlights an important point: AI may change how we work, but it should not change what hospitality stands for.As an industry, we should not see AI only as a way to reduce labour costs.

We as an industry need to focus on careers and not only jobs. What we have found is that a solid education in hospitality including an internship can prepare people for any service sector career opportunity, hospitality and tourism, retail, healthcare etc.

Hospitality’s talent crisis is not about supply; it is about signalling. For too long, the sector, still dominated by fragmented, family-run SMEs, has relied on informal narratives and outdated assumptions about “passion” and “hard work,” rather than articulating a compelling, modern value proposition.

The perception issue is compelling. Perception matters, especially among Gen Z, but it is often shaped by lived experiences, labor market signals, and what students observe through internships, part-time jobs, and social narratives.Based on my experience working with students, many are not aware of the variety of career opportunities in hospitality.