10 Tips to Manage Your Hospitality Employees Better
Whatever kind of hospitality environment you manage, this sector moves fast. And the pressures, such as competition and changing customer demands, are high.
For these reasons, it’s essential to support staff much more attentively than any other sector if you want customers to be happy and staff to remain and grow with the company or business.
The drivers behind these fast-paced challenges are usually the very people who provide business: The customers.
Challenges in hospitality are unique because they are almost always caused by guests making various, constant demands on staff, from questions about menus to tailored services in hotels. There is only one answer to fulfilling these demands and retaining staff: Strong employee management.
This article explains the top thirteen tips to manage your hospitality employees better so you can satisfy guests while retaining top talent.
1. Set Clear Service Standards
First, you need to set clear service standards. How? Define exactly what good service looks like across roles and then show every employee what this looks like before they begin to work for you, using written guidelines.
It’s also crucial to reinforce these standards during onboarding and training, and for supervisors to model these behaviours.
2. Train for Consistency
Onboarding must be different for every single role in your restaurant or hotel. Cooks, managers, cleaners, and servers all need different onboarding.
Group new intakes of staff together, and you will not establish and maintain high standards. It’s also beneficial to use visual or hands-on demonstrations for clarity during onboarding sessions.
3. Build Strong Shift Leadership
Leadership is key to customer success, so business owners must pick out the natural leaders with a team to lead their colleagues.
Another key component of strong customer service comes naturally with employee discipline and respect. Provide supervision with decision-making authority so team members respect them and they complete tasks on the first ask. Offer training on conflict resolution and communication to equip supervisors with all the tools they need.
4. Use Daily Briefings
Daily meetings tie everyone together in a unified way and remind them that there is no I in team before they begin a shift.
These meetings are perfect opportunities to communicate updates, specials, and staffing changes so everyone is in the know.
It’s also a great time to review key goals for each shift.
5. Support Upskilling
Waiters often don’t want to be waiters forever, so offer cross-training opportunities to allow each role to move horizontally or vertically between roles. If staff know how to do different tasks, they are more stimulated, morale is higher, and they offer more flexibility to fill different shifts when sickness absence occurs last minute.
6. Implement Smart Scheduling
Scheduling is one of the most crucial elements of excellent customer service, so you need to get it right in a reliable, consistent way.
Offer predictable schedules that work for employees to avoid burnout, use tools to forecast busy periods when more staff will be necessary, and consider employee preferences where this is possible.
7. Encourage Two-Way Communication
You might train staff on how to communicate with guests in your hotel or restaurant, but do you offer two-way communication between management and team members?
This type of communication is crucial as it allows management to act quickly on employee feedback to provide the best experience for customers by adjusting customer service delivery.
8. Create a Motivating Culture
Culture takes time to build, but a healthy culture can make a world of difference to guests. Achieve a positive, healthy culture by rewarding great service to customers, promoting mutual respect with two-way communication, and holding team-building sessions during slow times of the week.
9. Standardize Task Checklists
When you standardize task checklists by using the same checklists for everyone, you will enjoy a number of benefits.
There will be less mistakes in housekeeping and food prep, morale and job satisfaction will be higher and customer service will improve too.
Use templates for repeatable daily tasks and ensure consistency across shifts and locations to save managers time.
10. Invest in Digital Tools
Digital tools like employee management software makes every aspect of hospitality employee scheduling, task tracking and communication a breeze.
Digital tools eliminate the delayed responses to record keeping in hotels that can be caused by physical records and can reduce confusion around scheduling and responsibilities for specific roles.
Conclusion
It can feel overwhelming to manage hospitality staff, but don’t get confused, get prepared; A strong hospitality team thrives on clarity, consistency, and communication.
By setting clear service standards, tailoring onboarding to each role, and running daily briefings, you create a structure employees can trust.
Add smart scheduling, a motivating culture, and digital tools, and you build a workplace where staff feel supported, engaged, service improves naturally, and guests walk away happier.