August 23, 2023
This book champions always going above and beyond to over-deliver to guests, practicing what Guidara refers to as “unreasonable hospitality.” He believes that hospitality is about making a connection and says that, “every business can choose to be a hospitality business.”
Regardless of your industry, your company can deliver hospitality by taking ordinary transactions and turning them into extraordinary experiences.
A lot of my workflow is influenced by Dan Charnas’ book Work Clean, which draws inspiration from the culinary principles of “mise en place.” I wrote more about that here.
Over the last few months I have been returning to it, referencing it, and mulling over a connection I see between hospitality, experiences, and systems.
Maybe it’s a hotel stay, a meal out, or even a visit at a friend’s house. All of these are experiences. A sequence of moments where we are doing, seeing, and feelings things. Hospitality and experiences are about how we make people feel**.**
When it makes people feel seen, heard, and cared for. Whether that’s through listening deeply, paying attention to and remembering details, going out of your way to surprise and delight, or executing something with precision. Guidara says, “people who are gifted at hospitality tend to be sensitive.” They are observant, generous, care deeply, and have a knack for picking up on what is happening around them. Folks who are skilled in those areas are adept at crafting exceptional experiences not only because of their ability to quickly tune in to how someone is feeling but also because they genuinely care to make the experience better.
Ok, so how does this connect to systems?
In business we have core processes (activities a customer is paying for) and support processes (activities a customer doesn’t see but which are necessary to support the core processes) and this philosophy applies to both. While the word hospitality may prompt you to think immediately of the customer, Guidara emphasizes in his book how crucial it is to consider the experiences of employees, too. He recognized that if he wanted his team to worry about how they made customers feel, he also had to be deeply invested in how he made his team feel.
When working in operations, you’re designing the experiences that both employees and clients/customers will have. Since a process generally represents an activity that will be repeated, whether it’s the check-out process a customer goes through when they buy your product, or the reporting process teammates execute at the end of a quarter, it makes sense to try to make it as enjoyable an experience as possible. Enjoyable can mean many things depending on the context of your business and whether the process is core or supporting; engaging, efficient, precise, personalized, error-free, well-documented, and generous are some words that come to mind.
When you are designing a new system, begin by setting an intention, defining not only what your desired outcome for the system is, but also how you intend folks participating in the system to feel.