Choklit Blog #39: Eight Important Elements of the Hospitality Industry

[It's my final paper for HOS 140]


As the fast-paced life of the typical American becomes more stressful, more of us are looking for ways to get a quick, easy meal or take a relaxing week off.  Enter the hospitality industry.  Many people count on the hospitality industry to cater to their every whim whenever they feel like taking a break-- and the industry aims to do just that.  Pampering people may not sound like a complicated task, but there are many important concepts to remember when you’re working with hospitality.

Exceptional Service.  When you go to a restaurant, what kind of service do you expect?  Probably good service-- you want the employees to meet your requests.  When a person experiences good service from a hospitality company, they’re likely to be satisfied and maybe come again.  However, if you want to ensure repeat customers at your establishment, you must provide them with exceptional service.  This means going above and beyond “good” or even “great.”  Your customer should feel relaxed and at ease; they should feel pampered, like you truly care about them.  Put yourself in the customer’s shoes and treat them the way you would want to be treated.  Looking at things from a different perspective every now and then will greatly improve the quality of your service, which will positively affect your number of customers and amount of profit.  Whether it be a friendly server, an extra amenity, or simply a pleasant atmosphere, exceptional service will not go unnoticed

Organization.  If you're not organized, you can count on never getting anything done.  I recently participated in a group management project, in which a group created an employee handbook for a fictional restaurant.  With this one simple project, I had about fifteen different files on my computer, which I constantly had to refer to or email to someone.  It was essential to the success of my group that I keep all the files organized properly, or our handbook would have been a disaster!  Creating an employee handbook is only a small part of running a business; hospitality managers have so many other things to keep track of, such as finances, menus, and employees.  Without good organization, a company can fall apart.  Of course, “good organization” doesn’t just mean keeping track of information.  A good manager will also properly organize his schedule, keeping tasks prioritized and allowing time for mistakes.  The hospitality industry can be stressful, but good organization will lighten the burden significantly.

Business and technical knowledge.  Know your industry!  Two reasons why many restaurants fail are lack of business knowledge, and lack of technical knowledge.  The hospitality industry is competitive, and you can’t expect to survive if you don’t know what you’re doing.  As far as business knowledge, you should know things like what to pay your employees, how much to charge for services, how to market your business, and what you can and cannot do legally.  Technical knowledge is required to successfully select a restaurant site, plan a concept and menu for your company, and purchase necessary materials to produce your services.  Without this kind of intelligence, you cannot run a hospitality business while avoiding risks of being shut down due to illegal practices, running out of money, lacking customers, and completely failing.  It’s also important to keep up with industry trends, as no one wants outdated services.  As I said before, the industry is competitive; you have to know what customers want, and know how to give it to them successfully.  Without business and technical knowledge, you cannot expect to accomplish that.

Balanced cost and quality.  If you spend all your money, you won’t make any money.  If your products are too low-quality, you still won’t make any money.  It’s important to keep cost down and quality up in the hospitality industry.  However, cost and quality often present a great conflict in any industry; typically, low cost produces low quality, and high quality requires high cost.  The key to controlling costs while maintaining good quality is to plan menus with as few ingredients as possible, and with inexpensive ingredients.  If you offer products that require normally expensive purchases, it may be difficult to afford quality ingredients.  You must also be sure to calculate prices for your products that are low enough for your target market segment, yet high enough to produce necessary revenue.  This is one area where business and technical knowledge come into play.  While balancing cost and quality can be difficult, it is a vital part of success in the hospitality industry.

Marketing.  One of the more obvious needs of a good hospitality company is marketing.  Without marketing, a great business can fail miserably just because no one knows about it!  However, marketing is not as simple as it may seem.  You can tell people about your business all day long, but that does not guarantee that you will actually have customers.  A good marketing campaign should grab potential customers’ attention and promise them something they can’t resist.  It should be a combination of offering them what they want, and telling them what they want; offer them a product or service they want, and tell them they want to get it from your establishment.  Advertisements should look appealing to your establishment’s target market and be easy to spot; they should be in locations that are common to your target customers.  It’s important to have a marketing budget, as marketing can be expensive.  Basically, marketing should grab people’s attention, convince them to purchase your product, and stay within budget.

Ethics.  One of the biggest issues in the hospitality industry is discrimination.  Discrimination can occur on the basis of race, sex, religion, age, disability, appearance, or many other personal characteristics.  Some discrimination is legal, but it is important for hospitality managers to know what discrimination is legal and what is illegal, as illegal discrimination could be very costly  to the company.  There are other ethical issues in hospitality, such as harassment.  Sexual harassment is a growing problem in the hospitality industry, possibly due to the large numbers of male managers over female employees.  Hospitality companies should make an effort to educate their female workers about ways to avoid harassment and what to do if it happens.  The companies should also do what they can to help prevent harassment and other ethical problems.  Social responsibility can be expensive, and the benefits are hard to measure, but it can help a company to steer clear of legal issues and unnecessary expenses associated with fixing problems.  In addition to preventing problems, some hospitality companies choose to be socially proactive by donating time and money to charitable foundations.  There are many different issues concerning ethics in the hospitality industry, and while practicing good ethics may appear to cause unnecessary expenses, it can greatly benefit a company.

Selecting and training employees.  A company’s success depends largely on its employees.  A company must have an effective employee selection process and training program.  If a company hires bad employees, they will either lose money because of bad service, or they will lose money from constantly having to hire new employees.  It is far more expensive to keep firing and hiring than to get someone good right off the bat.  Before the selection process begins, of course, the company must advertise open positions in the right places.  Hiring may be done internally or externally; the important thing is that the company knows where to look for good employees, and knows how to select the best applicants.  Once the employee is hired, they most likely will not be able to do their job correctly without proper training.  There are some dangerous work environments in the hospitality industry, and it is vital that employees be able to safely perform all the tasks required on the job.  Good employee selection and proper training can help hospitality companies avoid excessive firing and hiring as well as legal issues associated with work-related injuries, and it will improve the quality of the company’s service.

Reducing turnover.  The hospitality industry has a very high turnover rate.  This may be for any of several reasons including discrimination, unfair pay, poor management, or bad lower-level employees.  There is not just one issue that can be addressed to fix the problem of high turnover.  Turnover reduction, often referred to as employee retention (as many companies feel they can better begin to solve the problem by referring to it in positive terms), must be solved on a case-by-case basis.  One restaurant may need to hire a new manager, while a hotel may need to pay its employees higher wages.  Some turnover is desired, as a company will most likely always have a few poor employees.  A good way to deal with this problem is to focus on making an ideal work environment for the average and above average employees and to encourage the poor employees to work for competitors.  Every hospitality manager should evaluate his own company and figure out how to best satisfy his employees.

The issues I’ve discussed here are crucial for any hospitality company.  Without exceptional service, proper organization, business and technical knowledge, balanced cost and quality, good marketing, ethics, effectively selecting and training employees, and reducing turnover, any hospitality company is at risk of failure.

Choklit Blog #38: Leadership

"Natural born leaders are few and far between. Self-made leaders are everywhere. - Make it happen." --Jesse Watson
I just saw that on Twitter, and it seemed appropriate to put in a blog about leadership. So I did.


So, I recently had to do a group project in a Hospitality Management class. It wasn't fun, but it was a really great learning experience and I think the purpose of this class is to teach about management, not to be fun. And so I pretty much want to recap the project and all the things I learned from it about leadership. I'll try not to make this boring!


The project was to form a group, pick a group leader, find several employee handbooks from restaurants, and use the best policies from those handbooks to create an ideal employee handbook for our own restaurant. It's a lot harder than it sounds.


We had about 2 months to do this project, and I got in a group right at the beginning with mostly people I knew. Someone volunteered to be group leader, she seemed to know what she was doing, and everything seemed good.


Before long, we all ended up really confused, the group leader was mad at us, we were mad at her, untrue things were said, people were insulted, and a lot of pointless emails were sent out. Some people tried to cooperate, some people tried to prove that they knew everything. It was pretty clear that the group leader wasn't being a very good leader. So I decided she should be fired. The groups were allowed to fire people if the majority of the group voted for it. I contacted a few group members, got enough votes, and sent out the emails letting everyone know she was fired. And then the position of group leader fell to me.


Now, a month before, I would have died if I thought I had to be group leader. But at this point I knew what needed to be done for the project, and I wasn't taking anymore attitudes from anyone who didn't want to cooperate. I spent a few weeks as group leader before finishing the project, and during that time, I learned several important rules for being a good manager.


Communicate
The very first problem we had with our original group was that people weren't sure what they were supposed to be doing. We would all get one email from the group leader saying "This person needs to do this, that person needs to do that, and it needs to be done by this date." Obviously, all of us our college students, meaning all of us are BUSY. When a busy person gets an email on February 1st saying "Have this done by March 31st", they're likely to forget. So as group leader, I made sure to send out reminder emails and text messages often enough for everyone to remember that they're working on a project. The result was that everyone got everything finished in time.


Delegate
Another big problem in our group was that the group leader wanted to pick up everyone's slack if she felt they weren't getting done fast enough. She ended up doing over half the project by herself when she had an extremely busy schedule, which contributed to her getting mad at everyone and ultimately being fired.
In most of the culinary lab classes at my school, we have a chef of the day for each class period who basically assigns cleaning tasks to everyone, and sometimes has other responsibilities depending on the class. The first time I was chef of the day, I was really freaked out that I would have a ton of other stuff to do, and I wouldn't get my product finished. My chef instructor said something to me that I'll probably never forget: "Remember, Violet, the word of the day is 'delegate'." I had so much fun that day telling people what to do.
If you don't delegate, you'll get overloaded, and nothing will get done.


Prioritize
This actually needs to be done before the delegating. You, as the manager, have to decide which tasks need to be done first, and which ones can be done later, skipped if necessary, or done by yourself. In the case of this project, it would have been ridiculous to have everyone editing sections 1-4 of the handbook when sections 5 and 6 had yet to be done, eh?


Know your employees
One of the reasons we originally ran into so many problems is because a lot of the group members didn't know each other. The group leader didn't know most of us very well; she didn't know out work ethic, our strengths and weaknesses, what responsibilities we could handle, etc. We never had a face-to-face meeting as a group, and all the communication was impersonal. Not everyone communicates the same, and not everyone works the same. Since I knew everyone in the group, I was able to delegate the work according to what I knew people would get done in time, and I was able to communicate clearly with everyone. As a manager, you most likely won't be employing a bunch of your friends, so take time to get to know your employees.


Set high goals
Not completely unrealistically high. If you set unrealistic goals, employees will feel that they have no chance of reaching those goals, and they'll give up. For example, the original group leader wanted to have the entire project completed a month early. No one else was up for that. Once I became group leader, I set our goal for one week in advance. Did that happen? No; that was the purpose of setting a goal higher than necessary. People are not perfect and a lot of the time, people don't exactly reach their goals. Set high enough goals that there's room to make mistakes and still end up with a good result; but don't set unrealistic goals.


Always be professional/respectful
No one likes to feel disrespected. Our original group leader made everyone feel that way; she basically insulted us because we didn't meet all of her expectations and do everything exactly as she wanted. Several group members communicated with her professionally and respectfully, always giving her the benefit of a doubt, but she would send back emails like "You're so rude. I have no interest in working with you. I'm kicking you out of the group." In the end, when I emailed her to let her know why she was fired, one of the reasons listed was her unprofessionalism. Most of the group members complained about it, and with just cause. If you want to be a professional, act like one; if you want to get fired, don't.


Compromise
This can be one of the hardest things to do, yet one of the most important. This was a problem I ran into in my experience as group leader. I'm a perfectionist... everything with me has to be absolutely perfect. During this project I had to learn to trust my co-workers' judgement a little. I assigned each group member a section of the handbook to edit, and it was really hard not to just do it all myself, but I found I had a lot less pressure on myself when I allowed them to be responsible for some things.


Be positive
Positive encouragement is a good technique to remember. There are a lot of times when discipline is necessary, but there are also a lot of times when it's not. If your employees don't seem to be getting things done, don't just get mad and punish them; always use a positive approach. Don't make it like "You did something bad so I'm disciplining you"; it should be more of "I'm trying to help you become a better person and employee by getting rid of this negative behavior." Always show your employees that you're willing to work with them to help them improve.


So that's it for now. I've got an early morning, and I need to go to bed.


EDIT:


So, I remembered two things today that I forgot to put in here. And I know no one has read it yet, so I can add them now. This is one of those times when I'm glad no one reads my blog unless I tell them to.


Organize
If you're not organized, you can count on never getting anything done. With this one simple project, I had about 15 different files on my computer that I had to keep organized enough that I could find each one when I needed it and email the right ones to the right people; I had to keep all the different sections of the handbook in the right places and make sure everything got added into the final document; and I had to put the final project in 3 different documents because of formatting. Now, that was pretty easy for me since my computer is way too organized already. Before I went crazy and cleaned up all my folders, I would have to re-download files every time I needed them, and it made things very inconvenient! I would have like 5 copies of the same file. Bad idea. Be organized.


Manage your time well
This is actually a problem I ran into. As I mentioned earlier, a lot of us didn't even work on the project for quite a while. At least, I think I mentioned that earlier. Anyway. Once we fired our group leader we had about 3 weeks left, so we really needed to get working. Did we do that? No, of course not, it was spring break. Did I end up rushing around at the last second getting information from people and worrying that we would never get done in time? Yes. No one needs the added stress, or the unnecessary risk of failure.


I'm really done this time. And I turned in the project today.