Hotel mindset

As any Michelin-starred chef will tell you, the real effort is not about producing a marvellous meal on the night the inspector visits, but it is ensuring it happens for every dish, every night of the week and every week of the year. Every minute of every day there has to be a snack available, we must anticipate failure of the coffee machines to ensure coffee is available on demand, we must ensure all meeting rooms are perfect and that every morning, when the doors open, everything is ready as though it’s the first day.

It is quite challenging to create a higher sense of urgency in the, already reactive, workplace teams. It requires careful change management as it is more than simply working faster. My preferred analogy is that we need to shift to a hotel mindset. If you have an issue as a guest in a hotel you don’t get asked to open a ticket. You are usually face to face with a representative of the hotel who looks to resolve your problem there and then. We need to think like that and not just drop it into the ticket system.

To that end, we have built Service Desks in our refurbished sites and staff them continuously throughout the day. We encourage our teams to find solutions and workarounds for the client in front of them and then work to solve the underlying issue. A subtle shift for sure, but if, like a magician, we cannot distract people with big flashy spot events then we better ensure the real close-up magic is faultless.