Put your people first and the rest will follow

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Welcome to

PUT YOUR PEOPLE FIRST and the rest will follow

My aim is to share the stories I have collected over the past 20 years of great hotelier example, great employee handling, some of my own examples that has taught me how important happiness at work is in order to have a happy profitable hotel and the research studies I have read. Rounding off with how a hotel structure could look like to nurture a happy environment for employees and guest alike. At the end, there is also an easy to follow “Happy Hotel Check list”.

Chapter teasers

1. Why is Happiness important?

By introducing empathy and compassion for our fellow colleagues we improved their chances of being happy at work.
You can only make others happy if you are happy yourself. In this chapter, we will look at reasons why to focus on happiness, what makes you happy at work, as well as why everyone should wake up and feel there is a good reason to go to work.

2. Fairness is the foundation

“Hi, I just wanted to shake your hand and tell you I have been in Parkhotel for the past 5 days and your team is amazing. Everyone are quick to solve issues and full of humor and willingness. I asked them why they were doing so great and everyone said; because Monika treats us so well. Congratulation, you must be a great leader.”
Now you ask what have I done to create this environment and the answer starts with FAIRNESS.

3. What makes us happy at work?

RESULTS: We need to create results from what we do and get recognition for it. If we are doing great work but no one is noticing, it leaves us less motivated to continue, otherwise “what is the point?”
RELATIONSHIPS: Human relationships are essential, more or less for different people, but still we all need them.
PURPOSE: We just take it for granted that we are in hospitality, that we are a service. Knowing why we do the things we do, knowing our purpose makes us happier. What makes us tick?

4. Most happy from making others happy

is’m not sure I had a higher calling as Leo Tolstoy so eloquently puts it “the sole meaning of life is to serve humanity”, but I have always enjoyed and felt good about being able to do things for others.

I genuinely believe that many, as I, join the industry because we enjoy giving service to others.

Here is a hotelier’s reasons for joining the industry:
“Passion and love for people, making a difference and leading in quality, compassion, change and ROI. It's in my veins and has been in my family over 200 years. I am the last one to prevail and savor every minute”.
Cornelia M. Kausch, Vice President Development
Pandox

5. The Tyrannosaurus Rex leader

“It [a hotel] is a slow-moving dinosaur with too many ego driven narcissistic managers, who spend too much time fighting ground breaking disruptors such as AirBnB, waste energy protecting their own power, complaining about the demands of new generations and limiting their team’s abilities to please guests and deliver amazing experiences.”
Dirk Dalichau

I have come across many leaders who strongly believe in good management/happiness for the people, but do not realize that the main issue is themselves.

6. Learning from the best

"We believe that if we treat our employees right, they will treat our customers right, and in turn that results in increased business and profits that make everyone happy,"
Southwest Airlines explain in a blog post about their company culture.

If you think about it, this is how we all want to be treated, isn’t it? We all want to be treated with respect, fairness and as individuals. What stops us from treating the people with lower ranks this way? What stops us from taking the Southwest Airlines or Disney approach?

7. Hospitality training in 15 min

“In my hotel if every person [employee] can understand the basic 4 words of welcome, thank you, please and goodbye, then we are good.”
Walter Ramsbacher, owner & manager
Ramsi Kinderhotel, Hermagor, Austria

I’m sure many recognize when I say that very often we bring in extra people to work on weekends, functions, high seasonal events and during vacations and more often than not we do this last minute and with very little advance notice for HR to set up proper on-boarding.
So we developed a quick guideline to share with anyone who came and it could be trained by everyone:

Be Yourself
Show empathy/respect
Take responsibility
Make it personal

8. Passion for people not numbers

9. Don’t play with people’s money

One of my managers came to my office, crying telling me “I have to resign and I need to stop now”. With a very surprised face I asked her to take a seat. She didn’t want to sit. After a while I learned that her husband had “hit the wall” and had been admitted to a mental institution and she needed to care for him and 3 kids. With panic written all over her face and voice, she told me she could no longer be of use to me, so she should go.
I quickly told her to go home and that I would put her on paid leave and we would talk when she would be ready. In the meantime, she should let me or the HR manager know if there was anything we could do to help her.

"Take care of your people when they need it the most and prioritize your people first when the company is in difficulty"
South West Airlines policy

We should never exploit people’s vulnerabilities and never punish people by taking money away from them. The same holds true for never using money as a bonus/reward system. Because it is a variable income it actually becomes a stress factor and a type of punishment when not achieved.
What science says and business does are two very different things. Business keeps striving for the carrot & stick approach (Pink’s Motivation 2.0 strategy) that was effective in the production society, where creative thinking was not expected and mass production without deviations was the way forward.
I know that most of you will flinch and resist when I say “predictable target bonuses do not work”, especially not if they are individually focused.

10. Recruit & Support

When we hired the new F&B manager we decided to start using a more involved strategy for our team. We set up a simple process:
A group of people from various departments were selected to be involved in the process of this position hire.
They reviewed all CVs – HR invited them in for a “group discussion”.
There are 3 more steps before we got to the last step where we got together; the group, immediate manager and me to agree on the correct choice. All with equal vote count.
All this was a process of 2 days.
When the final candidate was asked back, she told us, before she knew if she had gotten the job or not, that it was the best interview process she had ever been through.

11. Future hoteliers are valued assets

The overall approach and treatment of trainees in our industry keeps amazing me. How come we only want to offer positions that help us as a hotel and preferably pay nothing or absolute as little as possible to keep our costs down, with little or no reflection on what long term damage we are doing.
Over the past 20 years I have been hearing senior managers saying:
"We are giving young people an opportunity to put our logo on their CV".
“.Company leadership with legacy attitudes toward unpaid internships would do well to remember the even older adage:
you get what you pay for"
Tim Brooks, Principal Consultant
Digital Transformation at World Wide Technology

12. The power of social media

He [a guest] told me that he had sat at a dinner party a few months back and TripAdvisor had come up as a conversation. One of the guest told the story about a GM who answered in a completely different way than others. The person went on describing how the answers were bold, honest and gave you the feeling that this person truly cared about the employees and guests in that order.
The letter continues describing that when he then had to do a trip to Prague, he decided to try the hotel that had this different GM.

After 5 days in the hotel the writer told me that he finally understood why I, The GM in question, answered the way I did. Everyone in the hotel he talked to where friendly, happy and seemed genuinely happy to be at work. When he asked why, the unison answer was “because Monika treats us all so well”.

Don’t feel threatened by Social Media
– think –
It will be my pleasure to respond.

13. Where are we going?

My dream is to take a hotel and implement a complete happiness structure; focused on self-driven work and focused on the goal of making the guest happy. If we truly are looking to make everyone in the hotel happy then we need a flatter management structure, more interdependence and more overlapping departments.

"If everyone had to think outside the box, maybe it was the box that needed fixing"
Malcolm Gladwell, What the Dog Saw

Holacracy could help you empower each of your team members, ensuring they are accountable for the results while having fun like a kid.

A person who is eager to learn new things is more open to change, more willing to consider new ideas and most importantly; interested in listening to and considering suggestions from others.

14. Where do we come from?

Hospitality is considered one of the oldest professions alongside prostitution. As long as people have curiously moved around, there has been hospitality. A common definition is “the friendly and generous reception and entertainment of guests, visitors, or strangers or the quality or disposition of receiving and treating guests and strangers in a warm, friendly, generous way”. [Wikipedia]
Philoxenia is the Greek word for hospitality. Philo means “I am fond of/I love” and Xenia means “the unknown guest”.
The better the host behaved, the more rewarded by the gods he would be, as well as he could come to expect some form of reward from the guest.
The guest would be clearly moving on shortly to ensure not overstaying the hospitality of the host, as not to land the wrath of the gods upon him for gluttony.
You may argue that this is due to the factor of payment, when we moved from “expect to pay” to “have to pay” the guests lost their motivation to treat hosts respectfully.

15. The future is happy

Finding the right people, who want to take these service jobs, is becoming increasingly difficult (especially in certain parts of the world). People who can deliver the right attitude at the right time and adapt to the fast changes.
How we can master this in our hotels?
The solution lies in happiness at work. Our people need to have passion and this they get from a leader in an organization with a clear and strong vision/purpose.
For us to be happy we need to feel that we are creating results and spending our time in the company of good people that we can trust.
Most people leave because of bad bosses, so ensure the team is treated fairly and respectfully. Maybe even participating in recruiting their own boss.
The great news is that most of the things required to implement a happy hotel workplace are not expensive, neither are they difficult.
What is challenging is to take the first step and decide to change something that has always been.
Therefore, I am giving you a starting point by giving you a “Happy Hotels Checklist”.

BE among the FIRST to order my book Put your people first and get a signed copy send to you in November

What Hoteliers say about PUT YOUR PEOPLE FIRST

Amazing, very easy to read and understand.
I cannot wait to read the entire piece, moreover to get a copy for every single manager in my hotels.
Long time waited truth about hotel industry culture is finally here! I am excited to share the book with all of my colleagues in order not to ever become an “dinosaur” 😊
Katerina Lenkova
Hotel Manager, Vienna House, Prague

Not just did I enjoy reading the first pages, but I had the enormous pleasure to see her putting it into practice - This gives these ideas much more credibility and relevance!
As a hotelier, I will use these ideas for sure –as a business consultant I also saw the extra profit coming over time, which is to be honest a must added benefit to convince more people about getting on board ;)
Lars van den Wetten
Managing Director Solutions HI Hotel Industry Strategies

An interesting read!
Those three main factors drive engagement, motivate people to "own" their jobs and act responsibly, which in turn enhances the customer experience.
A couple of thoughts, in no way to be considered as negative criticism:
1. no boss/manager (reader) thinks they are a dinosaur even if they actually are;
2. happiness at work doesn't come from feeling good about yourself, but from feeling good about overcoming obstacles and taking on more responsibility.
Good luck!
Hope it's a bestseller 😄
Keyth Pisani
Corinthia Group Deputy Managing Director

Brilliant work Monika!
I have read the 9 pages and I am ready for more! This book will become a great eye opener and tool for many hoteliers (and employees) - I a way common sense - as in how most people would like to behave but don't dare as they are never taught to in relation to running a successful business. Good work to dare people! This is how changes are inaugurated 👍🏻
Lene Walter
PR/Media Hotel Consultant, Copenhagen

Why am I writing this book?

I am regularly asked to speak at conferences and events on topics like inspiration, leadership and motivation. Often, I am asked to give inspirational workshops, service culture trainings and once I was asked why don’t I write a book about how it should be done in the hospitality world, as I am considered a “one of a kind boss”.

Last conferences I spoke at were:
Happiness at Work Conference, Prague 2016
Happy People Better Business, Den Haag 2017

Next speaking engagement is:
http://spotlighthotel.pl/programme-iv-edition.html

2 years ago, I wrote a LinkedIn post, that has now circled the world over 2 years, raising debates and disagreements whenever it surfaces. The LinkedIn post was about being tired of abusive guests who threatens with social media if they don’t get what they want and about senior managers who for decades have overruled employees in order to please the misbehaving “guests”.

My blog/articles can be found on:
www.monikahilm.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/monikabevreus

Based on the two above ideas; here comes the first book of its kind. How to really take care of the people who work in hotels, rather than making nice marketing statements about what should be in a perfect world.

About Monika

I spend 11 years in a corporate chain before I began to manage individual hotels. I found the individual hotels rewarding, as I had space to test and trial new ways of doing things. Being allowed to act, I turned around a very poor performing hotel to a great establishment with good reputation for both guest and employees alike, in less than 4 years.
I saw firsthandedly the amazing impact of allowing people freedom. By agreeing on challenging, but achievable target and then letting the team do their jobs in peace. I removed extensive reporting and added lots of encouragement and fun. We created a successful work environment where the team worked hard when needed and took the time out when possible.
Equipped with a BSc. degree in Hotel Management from Oxford Brookes University and working and living in more than 10 countries, I can confidentially say that there are more similarities between people than there are differences. People want to be respected, listened to and be treated fairly and above all most people want to do a good job.