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It’s Time for Hoteliers to Be Honest About Labor Concerns

Retention, Technology Use Among the Chief Challenges
Bob Habeeb
Bob Habeeb
HNN columnist
November 1, 2022 | 12:38 P.M.

Hospitality leaders have spent years expressing repeated concern about the industry’s ongoing labor shortage, and yet it persists. Indeed, nearly three years into the pandemic, there are more open hotel positions than ever before. The cost of finding, acquiring, training and retaining skilled workers has simply never been higher. Even in the face of this crisis, and amid news from the U.S. Labor Department that job growth is expected to sharply contract over the next decade, hotels are still not confronting the reality of what must change in order to be successful in this environment. Hospitality must once again become an industry where people want to work — it must entice them.

The first question hoteliers need to ask themselves is, “Who is my ideal worker today?” A significant shift in the workforce had been taking place over the past five years, but the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated these changes. Many baby boomers saw the pandemic as the ideal time to retire. Wage increases and the remote working trends have spread the pool of available labor even more thin. And perhaps most troubling, the abrupt shutdown caused by the pandemic created a storm cloud of perceived instability that has been hanging over hospitality ever since.

It is imperative that the hospitality industry finds a way to “re-create” a workplace experience that is as magnetic as we all know the industry to be.

Hard Truths

As the first step in this process, hotels must acknowledge they are no longer meeting workers’ needs the way they have in the past. Shifts in generational needs and interests have resulted in workers expecting more control over their positions, more control over what they are doing day to day, and this has largely been fueled by technology.

While it has been encouraging to see the hospitality industry adopting and implementing new technologies in recent years, some of these investments are either being poorly executed or hotels are unable to fluidly add them into their workflow due to the challenge of keeping up with daily operations. This is a challenge that must be overcome, especially when considering the impact of the gig economy on people’s relationship to technology while working.

The biggest challenge of all, however, is finding a way to retain your hotel’s talented and experienced team members. At the end of the day, the hospitality industry must remember to turn its focus inward and create a sense of belonging for its employees and build connections between workers, guests and the hotel internally.

Some workers today are impulsively quitting the industry, not because the job is too difficult but because they lack an emotional connection to the property. We have all had tough days at work, but all worker loyalty is thrown out the window the second they feel as if they can be replaced. Today’s star employees are helping keep our hotels open, and they must be recognized for this or they will move on like so many others.

Moving Forward

During the early days of the pandemic, industry analysts said workers’ slower-than-anticipated return to hospitality positions was a result of the government’s extended benefits. Over time, however, the great pause the pandemic put on the economy gave workers time to think about their future employment opportunities. This freedom resulted from the confluence of a variety of factors, including the ubiquity of smartphone technology, rising wage parity, the appeal of the gig economy, the perceived instability of the service industry and more to create a fundamental shift in the workforce that is here to stay.

Wage inflation is only a piece of the labor puzzle, but finding ways to increase compensation or benefits for hotel workers must be a part of the discussion as well. Minimum wage is more flexible today than ever before, and hotel operators are competing for workers using the wrong messages. It’s time to take a step back and recognize the generational shifts taking place across the nation and how they impact the workforce. By fostering a sense of community and belonging, hotels can become an enjoyable work environment that is conducive to hospitality.

Hoteliers should stop asking themselves if the current labor market is here to stay, because it is. Hospitality must once again become an industry in which people want to work, and that is not a transformation that can take place overnight. Operators are right to focus on technology, but by acknowledging the generational shifts taking place in today’s workforce, the “people business” can begin to retain its people better.

Bob Habeeb is founder and CEO of Maverick Hotels and Restaurants.

The opinions expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Hotel News Now or CoStar Group and its affiliated companies. Bloggers published on this site are given the freedom to express views that may be controversial, but our goal is to provoke thought and constructive discussion within our reader community. Please feel free to contact an editor with any questions or concern.

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