We recently have come out of one crisis and are in the middle of the next one, promising to overshadow our existence for quite some time even though a superfluous buoyancy is covering up the underlying causes for most. More and more entrepreneurs and self-employed, those keeping the machine going, a machine that is being stretched by inept politicians with an ever-surprising capacity to top themselves in ignoring the facts, seem to have concluded that a change in paradigm is uprooting our hospitality industry.
For decades, lean management has been heralding maximization of economic profits by ever more reducing excesses of every kind, by sourcing the cheapest of all possible product and labor, oblivious of detrimental side effects.
Well, the interruption of our supply chains during the pandemic, a container ship blocking the Suez Canal in March’21, the Russian gas crisis or, more concretely and paramount in our case of an island hospitality economy, the impossibility of finding and retaining not only competent but even incompetent employees has become the new normal.
While for years the credo has been the maximization of shareholder value at all costs, the rank-and-file have and continue to struggle with often too basic a salary and too precarious a labor situation to strive and even to survive.
While this message might seem to come from a unionist, the absolute opposite is the case. Having had the privilege to talk to quite some unionists in my career, I couldn’t possibly agree less with their dialectical ingenuity and victimization.
Nevertheless, the paradigm shift we are going through is of substance. Instead of luring guests with more luxury, better experiences, more sustainability talk and whatever other marketing fatuity to try and distinguish us from competitors, it is time to profoundly and honestly revisit the business model of our other guest, of those internal customers we so totally and utterly depend on.
While some might conform with acquiring AI and robots to replace the team, this cannot and must not be the solution for all those claiming to be socially and environmentally responsible. Our guests yearn for recognition, impossible to be obtained from AI or robots. Our team members not only yearn for recognition but for proper training, a challenging and fulfilling job and a life-work balance allowing to lead a meaningful life. Until we are not able to offer these basics to our team, we will fail in our endeavor to create a better business model, sustainable over time, independent of the degree to which we comply to 2030’s SDG’s.
Let’s start by elevating the prestige of those rank-and-file positions. Let’s review the educational offering to enhance the prestige and the added value of every single one of the positions required in our hospitality business. In other cultures, people pride themselves of being able to serve. In our culture we prefer to lay bricks instead of upping our professional aptitudes to serve better. And that is so even though we in Mallorca enjoy the enormous privilege to be one of the most highly recognized and leading tourism destinations worldwide. We have got no better idea than to rename squares after those who clean guest rooms. Shouldn’t we devote our efforts instead to finding long-term solutions satisfying all stakeholders, creating a long chain of value creation starting from the bottom up? We need a profound shift in our model if we want to make it sustainable: environmentally, economically, and above all, socially.