How to motivate employees

Five great habits to motivate young workers

By Iain Woessner

Here are five free actionable steps any hotel or restaurant of any size can take to instill enthusiasm into their employees.

1. Share in the vision.

From the start—even as early as the interview process —be open and honest to prospective employees about just how far in your business they can rise, what potentials they can tap into, should they work hard and learn well. You don’t have to go it alone – the Washington Hospitality Association provides a hospitality career navigator, which can allow any employee of any level chart out the many wonderful paths their career could take them, should they stay the course.

business is run. Before anything else, the owners, operators, general managers and supervisors of any hospitality business should understand how their business works from top to bottom. 2. Knowledge is king.

Everyone in your organization, especially supervisors and managers, should have a functioning knowledge of how their

3. Show, don’t tell.

“There’s just so much knowledge … you go into it not confident you’re doing it right because you don’t know what you’re doing,” Alyssa Flores, training programs coordinator for the Washington Hospitality Association Education Foundation said. “Demonstrating and showing people how to do something is a huge thing, because people say ‘do this’ and they don’t show how to do it and kids are running around and they’re like ‘I’m just going to improvise’.” When it comes to serving food and caring for guests, improvisation is simply too risky. For leaders like Jaime Fox, director of training and safety for Hops n Drops, the training process seems to

“In our classroom style of training we may do something called situations and scenarios, I have a younger team member and an older couple that is joining them, you need to seat them, what are your considerations?” Fox said. “Really running them through things they’d experience, make suggestions outside the box, so they learn to think that way. Then there’s fellowship training, shadowing a host … where we can role model that and help them learn that.”

This advice is equally as valuable to hoteliers as it is restaurants. Scott Snofsky, current general manager of Delta Hotels by Marriott Phoenix Mesa, in Arizona and a former general manager of Hilton Garden Inn in Bellevue, said that managers need to be supportive of employees as they learn the ropes.

“You just have to be constantly present,” Snofsky said. “Every hotel brand has the five steps to this or the 10 steps to that. Everyone watches a video with smiling people, but none of that matters if in the moment people are left on their own, they don’t have a model for that behavior when things go sideways because it always goes sideways. They need to have somebody with them, watching them, knowing what they’re doing is important and they need to know that somebody cares about the job they do. I don’t know if that’s training, but that’s how to ensure great service. It’s muscle memory. It’s all about doing it over and over again.”

Nobody likes to make a mistake, and 4. Protect your workers. nobody feels good when an entire dinner service is delayed because of their mess up. If a mistake is big or if a mistake is small, an employee is vulnerable in that moment and it is the responsibility of their supervisor to ensure that vulnerability results in a learning moment. Fox recommends redirection over reprimands, and to expand your definition of safety to not simply stop at physical safety, but to safeguard your employees’ emotional health too.

“Knowing that you care about our emotional safety, to feel free to make a mistake,” Fox said. “I think it comes down to the power of a question. A reprimand is never a question … let’s say I’ve seen someone leave the ice scoop in the ice, and I say ‘don’t do that ‘ … instead (I) ask ‘do you know why it’s important to leave that in our holder?’ and explain.”

Explaining the reason behind the practice, why it is valuable, the consequences of failing to live up to that standard – this approach is proven effective to instilling the responsibility of their work into young workers.

5. Communicate and collaborate. from every level of the hospitality industry, from the owners to the staff and from the staff to the guests. Communicating your expectations is critical, but especially critical is communicating positive feedback for living up to them. Positive reinforcement is even more valuable—employees retain positive feedback strongly, and they respond well to being affirmed when they are doing well, rather than being compounded by what they are doing wrong. Communication is a chain, it’s essential

“I go out of my way and my managers go out of their way to make them feel special,” Fox said. “Then we just watch them blossom in turn.” 