The hotel industry clearly has a laundry list of issues related to labor, chief among them the availability of workers needed to keep the lights on.
It would be understandable if that was taking up the lion's share of bandwidth for people in hotel operations, figuring out how to woo more workers to the hotel industry and how to properly manage the costs of that labor while demand patterns are likely to be in flux.
Even with that in mind, I sincerely believe the most pressing labor issue the industry faces is the well-being of those who are already in the industry and particularly those who have suffered through all of the ill effects of the pandemic and downturn while consistently doing their jobs.
Much like we shouldn't be treating the pandemic as a thing of the past — as all the available data tells us it very much isn't — we shouldn't be treating pandemic-induced burnout, and the specific pain points that cause it, as a thing of the past.
It's so easy to fall into a trap in which we just think about the past summer travel season as a good thing, and it definitely was even better than good for many hotels' bottom lines. But if you look more closely at how the past couple of years have gone, I think it's not too much to say that 2020 was bad for both hotels and their employees, but 2021 — in particular the summer of 2021 — was pretty decent for hotels but still bad for those employees.
As my boss Stephanie Ricca rightly pointed out earlier this month, the financial successes of this summer travel season were gained on the backs of hotel workers at the cost of "wear and tear" that feels like it goes down to the soul.
The accumulated burnout people are facing from dealing with the past year and a half, coupled with the lingering knowledge that we're still not out of the woods and there's not a clear path back to life as we once knew it, is just a massive emotional and mental drain. Your people are dealing with that right now. Every minute. Every hour. Every day.
It goes from top to bottom. I don't think it's a coincidence that over the course of this pandemic we've had a wave of senior executives retiring across the industry, and obviously there are still all the people who once worked in hotels and are clearly reluctant or even refuse to return.
It's easy to look at the cause and effect of vacancies, from housekeeping positions to the chief executive, and fixate on that. You can't get rooms clean, so you can't sell them and drive revenue. That's a huge issue, clearly. Or you're in the midst of searching for a visionary leader at a time when the best and brightest might be inclined to stay away from such a volatile industry, and that could have a domino effect in confidence throughout your organization.
But once again, those problems shouldn't be your sole or primary focus. The most important thing right now are those workers, many toiling away in silence, suffering the indignities related to an unappreciative customer base and internalizing that pain to avoid burdening those around them who they see going through the same strife. Those people are the priority, and their issues aren't magically going away.
Let me know what you think via email or on Twitter or LinkedIn.
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