What are the Fundamentals of Hospitality (Part 2)

After such a tough year for our industry, we wanted to share Hop's Fundamentals of Modern Hospitality. We use these Fundamentals to empower teams to be present with their colleagues and their guests. This is part two of the series, you can read part one here.

I hope that by sharing our Fundamentals, it inspires you to develop the Hospitality in your team. If we want to change the perception of Hospitality, we need to start taking ownership over how we train it.

As we mentioned in our last blog, the first two Fundamentals are Self Awareness and Guest Awareness. Once we get those in place, we can start to look at:

Connection

If we're self-aware and guest aware, we can then tailor our Hospitality to each specific guest. Unique, personalised, genuine Hospitality that's tailored to the energy of each guest. If we do this successfully, we can begin to build a meaningful connection with anyone. According to the author Daniel Pink, our drive comes from balancing intrinsic and extrinsic motivators. For all of us, part of our intrinsic motivation is cultivating meaningful connection with others. It's the reason we all work in Hospitality - it's also at the centre of every great guest experience. It's also at the heart of any great business, Hospitality or otherwise.

Authenticity

When we talk about authenticity, we're talking about being comfortable in your own skin. I'm still astounded by the number of teams we train who think they have to become someone else on the floor. They believe to be engaging; they have to put on a fake voice, change their accent, use generic scripts or hide behind a fake smile. Usually, these behaviours stem from terrible advice given early in their careers about not being interesting enough.

Here's the bottom line - the most engaging, exciting, interesting version of you is the one without all the facade. We can't connect with people who aren't being themselves. As humans, we're very good at picking up when someone isn't being their true self. Once we drop the masks, we have more status, more presence and more opportunity to build connection. There's also a phycological and cultural toll for keeping up facades at work - you can read more from Forbes magazine here.

We'll be publishing our final two Fundamentals in the New Year. I hope that by breaking Hospitality down into its Fundamental parts, we all start to realise how skilful it is—these are powerful attributes you'd want to develop in any team, in any business.