How to train employees for working in a high-end hotel?

There are four steps to make every employee outperform. All are your responsibility as a leader, but good news is that once you implement them, all drama about finding perfect team and complaining on your employees will disappear.

Here come the steps.

One, make them understand the big picture.

Two, let them have the high stakes.

Three, make the work easy for them.

Four, make the work fun for them.

This is how I see it.

Moral of the story: Everyone can outperform when set up for success. To know how, continue reading.

This post was inspired by Mr. Bean and Goku from Dragon Balls series. I used to watch both cartoons as a child. I use them here as a fun and vivid example to show that they can both be excellent workers, none is better than other. They just need to be given appropriate roles because they are so dramatically different, but that is the only drama here.

Understanding the big picture

It is essential to take your time to present the whole picture to your employee. What big picture, you are asking? The one of your hospitality business, with all the values, mission, concept, goals, vision, organisation, system, roles, processes, even some numbers!

Start with familiarising them with the company's values. Values as principles everyone in the company should work by but also as a feeling you want them to pass down to hotel guests and be recognised by. Give them examples of how these travel from you as an owner and some document where they are stated to actual guests and day to day situations. This is how they become real and implemented, instead of sounding too fancy to be used and sticking only around managerial circle. Really go into how they are being a better employee when acting according to these or how they can make their decisions right using these values. This is gold!

Tell them the story of your business and explain your mission and vision. Don’t use this as an opportunity to spotlight on you, but rather incorporate their role and how they can be part of the story. Explain them why being part of the story changes the nature of their job and gives it a higher mission, another level of importance and meaning to their working day. Motivate them truly. Show them how their contribution matters.

Eventually, let them know how you organise this business structure of yours, what the systems are, how they are connected, how complex it can become, how processes end up successful at the end of the day, etc. Give them sense of the machine running behind them. This also builds grounds for common understanding in the future. Another extremely valuable approach is to connect their role with the main goal for which the company aims and how they contribute to it.

Remember to speak their language all the time here. This means, it is your responsibility to make sure that they understand you. Your goal is not to hold a smart looking presentation. The role they apply to, their level of expertise, specific education and experience will help you estimate how fast they can grasp everything you have been deep into. It is not about how deep you will go but everything you choose to present should be told in a way that is easy for them to digest.

Use this opportunity to determine their commitment. How committed are they going to be? Can you see them in some higher role, some other department, can you count on them? How big they want to be in that big picture you have just presented to them? Let it sink in and have this on your mind when the time comes.

Having the high stakes

Of course you want your hotel to be successful when your stakes are high, but what is on stake for your employees?

They do not own it, nor do they directly take credit for its status. Even though margins can be low they don’t even have opportunity to think about them because it is out of their employee's picture. Certainly, what they can enjoy is exactly that freedom of not having to worry about sustainability and projection of important decisions but stakes are real and everyone needs some, they are just in a different form.

Truth is not all employees would like to think about any of these and some do appreciate security of monthly salary but not all of them. The difference can be small and looking same to you as an owner but the importance of addressing it is huge, critical in fact.

So this is what you need to do.

It is not about offering more benefits to every employee, but understanding what each of them values. Open the topic of their expectations but do push them further into the discussion. Understand which part of that big picture they are particularly interested in. Ask them what would make them care twice as much than ever before or how their perfect day would look like.

The key is to understand if they are motivated by money, promotion, recognition or something else. Also, what do they appreciate when it comes to nature of the role itself, is it performing no brainer actions, creativity or being in charge? Fighting dragons is not quite the same as buying the chair you want when there is a huge demand.

Use this opportunity to determine what would be suitable accountability for them. What is the level of decision they can be responsible for and would be happy with? Give them what they want, but do make of it what you need. It is desirable to create circumstances in which everyone has reason to care more.

Making it easy

The purpose of having procedures and standards for operations in your company is to capture and transfer knowledge and technical know-how, but also to make your employees' jobs easier and have less mistakes occur.

These are the reasons for systems, procedures and protocols. Not because it sounds fancy or every serious company seems to have it. It is to simplify execution of tasks, automate results, decrease stress and making same decisions, asking same questions over and over again, standardise service and assure quality and more.

Systems serve to allow for consistency when it comes to guests’ benefits and efficiency when it comes to internal benefits. Don't overdo it and make it complicated when it should be easy. Easy for your team first of all. Easy does not mean there is no mastery involved, special skill or diligence. Easy only means that everything is figured out in advance and in detail. One should not be thinking hard to perform their task in the best possible manner. They should only follow the procedure that makes sure it is done just as it should be.

Making if fun

Besides all the benefits of standardisation, systems which include people need dynamics that I simply call fun. It is essentially about introducing creativity whenever you can. Except, it is not always needed and the best thing to do here is to balance. Understand for each role what the creative parts could be. Have this stated in protocols as well, for each role. But then, also understand the importance of “easy” vs. “fun” for each employee. Would they rather have it easy or fun?

Fun is not easy. On the contrary, fun is very complex and important. It includes taking ownership of non-linear tasks which can not be programmed nor predicted all the time. Customisation of guest experience can be one of it, listening to the guests impressions, searching for a black swan piece of information while problem solving, thinking about optimisation, noticing repeating patterns, identifying space for improvement, etc. These tasks are in fact the most important ones for the business growth, its sustainability and future resilience. Therefore, fun is far away from unimportant.

From time to time, it is needed to include fun in other easy-to-standardise tasks, the ones that I call easy. This is due to human nature to get too much used to doing things in certain ways so that mistakes start to happen despite all the steps laid down. This way you can keep your people involved and yourself open to changes due to fresh conclusions from everyone.

There are no bad employees. You make them outperform. Use this strategy to get to know them better and make each other a perfect fit where everyone wins.

I invite you to share your business wisdom! Tell us, what is the biggest challenge when leading the team? Comment bellow.

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