20-04-2023

Hospitality is about feeling welcome

A career with its history and dignity that must recover its social and economic value, like chefs. Thoughts from dining room expert Mattia Cicognani

Taking care of the staff that takes care of the guests in our hotels and restaurants, while our country is dominated by the rhetoric of slacker youngsters, is crucial. It may sound strange but it’s the only antidote to solve a deeper problem. This mentality reveals a devaluating idea of hospitality careers because it implies that anyone could do them. Waiting, however, is not something you can improvise; it can’t be considered (by employers and employees) a way for uneducated or untrained people to make ends meet, but what it really is: a career with its history and dignity that must recover its social and  economic value, just as it happened with chefs.

Mattia Cicognani

Mattia Cicognani

Time for work and time for personal life: a necessary balance. Listening skills are often compromised by mental stress and physical fatigue. So it is necessary to invest more in the staff, to create a team work structure that generates human value for the employees and economic value for the company: investing more means starting a multiplying effect that increases customer satisfaction; the opposite, saving on staff, means renouncing on that multiplying effect and, naively, preferring an egg today to a hen tomorrow. 

It’s therefore important to convey enthusiasm. We must not look for people as they come, but we must train people who want to take this career, and make sure that more and more people choose this path: this can only happen if we convey the importance to the staff, fostering an equal and indiscriminatory vision.

In an industry where there’s a growing lack of skilled employees, it is necessary to sound attractive and interesting, especially for workers the younger ones, who represent the future.

It is also like this that you can build a serious company: through the image its employees have of it, as well as its clients, from which the prestige of the company and the consequent ambition of its qualified employees to add that name on their curriculum arise, starting a virtuous circle of high-quality work. The place of work becomes something to be proud of, instead of a place of everyday alienation, no matter how necessary. It becomes an electric impulse to inertia, the constant rediscovery of why you have chosen a job, if you have chosen it.

This is how brand identity becomes something sound, real gold instead of that kind of marketing that plates in gold a valueless structure. And high quality employees knock on your door before allowing to be bought.

Translated into English by Slawka G. Scarso


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