Why happy hospitality teams mean happy customers

Leadership and training are the glue that holds a team together in fast-paced hospitality environments | Graphic by John Osborne

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Whether you’re a Michelin-star restaurant or a scaled branded coffee chain, success in hospitality means delivering impeccable products and service across hundreds of customer interactions every day.

It’s a harsh reality that even occasional poor customer experience can quickly tarnish a brand’s hard-earned reputation. In an industry where emotional intelligence and a solutions-driven mindset are just as important as technical skill, leadership and training are the glue that holds a team together in fast-paced and complex hospitality environments.

“Many people underestimate how difficult it is to run a bar or restaurant,” says Thomas Nørøxe, CEO of global operator Joe & The Juice. Founded in 2002 by Kaspar Basse, Joe & The Juice was a pioneer of lifestyle hospitality with a focus on healthy food and beverages, premium coffee, sustainability and casual style of service.

To achieve this, the Copenhagen-based brand took an innovative approach to team building with an emphasis on individual personality and flair, including a non-uniform policy still in place today.

“Social ties and friendship were fundamental to Joe & The Juice in the early days, and they’re still core virtues for the business” Nørøxe says. “We work together as a team, but we have fun at the same time,” he adds.

This strategy has helped to propel Joe & The Juice to more than 360 stores across Europe, the US Asia and the Middle East. Nevertheless, becoming a ‘Juicer’, as team members are affectionately known, takes hard work and dedication by individuals and structured support from leaders.

The group’s 12-week training programme teaches staff to master one store station at a time to avoid overwhelming new starters. With Juicers taking up to six months to complete their training, Nørøxe says Joe & The Juice strives to retain the best team members by ensuring there are opportunities to progress within the business.

“We are very focused on laying a path to become a bar manager and then progressing into a leadership role with different skill sets. If you feel proud and satisfied with what you’re doing, that confidence gives guests the best experience,” he says.

Having first invested in Joe & The Juice with private equity firm Valedo Partners in 2013, Nørøxe turned his passion for the business into a career opportunity, serving as the chain’s Chief of Staff for two years, before being appointed to the top spot in 2021. Today, Nørøxe estimates that around 50% of Joe & The Juice’s senior leadership team has been promoted from within the business.

Joe & The Juice’s exceptional approach underlines the importance of staff retention to boost productivity, team morale and customer experience – but also profitability. A formula developed by US recruitment specialist the Work Institute shows it can cost more than $9,500 to replace an entry-level hospitality role paying $30,000, with that figure rising exponentially for senior staff.

A ‘Juicer’, as Joe & The Juice team members are affectionately known | Photo credit: Joe & The Juice

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Rising to the occasion

With customer satisfaction and profitability at stake, it is imperative for hospitality leaders to build strong support systems and a culture of purpose for their teams.

As a strategic food and beverage consultant for high-end hotel groups, Michael Butler works with venues to improve leadership, HR and training programmes with the ultimate goal of improving customer experience.

Butler started his career in the late 1980s as a store manager at a global fast-food chain before working as a general manager at Premier Inn and SSP Group, where he gained experience with well-known brands like Caffè Ritazza, Starbucks, and Costa Coffee.
 

“Successful hotels and hospitality venues build a great culture of care and service”
Michael Butler, Strategic Food & Beverage Consultant

In 2020, he took another career step by taking on consultancy roles for prominent restaurant and hotel brands, including Hyatt and a project with Nespresso in Switzerland. Today, Butler works as a strategic food and beverage consultant for various hotel groups and resorts and over the past year his company has provided support to over 290 midscale and luxury hotels.

“Successful hotels and hospitality venues build a great culture of care and service. It’s genuine, it lives and breathes,” he explains.

With over 30 years of experience, Butler has observed that effective leadership and a well-managed team can sometimes quadruple store sales within six to 12 weeks – a dynamic that driven his strong belief in the importance of training and support to build high-performing teams.

“Training and structured feedback are non-negotiable for me,” he says, adding that the best hotels ensure staff are thoroughly trained with proper inductions and constantly address customer feedback.

A lack of training can have profound negative consequences on a hospitality venue’s products and services, but it can also take a toll on staff wellbeing. “If you go back 30 years ago, most hotels were owned independently or by smaller hotel groups. The focus wasn't so much on profit, and they were totally focused on standards and processes. I think there has been a decline in ensuring that training happens.

“One of the reasons we see a lot more mental health problems in hospitality is that we no longer give people the same level of training and we promote people very quickly,” he says.
 

“The specialty coffee industry really needs help with business”
Miranda Caldwell, Founder, The Coffee MBA

Having worked as a barista, café manager, sales leader, trainer, green coffee buyer and COO over a career spanning 24 years, Miranda Caldwell is also acutely aware of the importance of structured training and support for teams.

Frustrated with the lack of business acumen she encountered at many specialty coffee businesses Caldwell took a hiatus from coffee to pursue an MBA. However, returning to the fold in 2023, Caldwell founded the Coffee MBA, an education and knowledge platform designed to help specialty coffee businesses improve internal processes, develop business skills and build better teams.

“The specialty coffee industry really needs help with business,” she says, emphasising the important role strong leadership played in her own early career. Rising through the ranks from barista to café manager and trainer, Caldwell recalls a senior manager who spotted her aptitude and provided mentorship, training and support.

“I was taught how to build a schedule because I had no experience. I got to shadow and learn how to conduct training – I even had strong leadership on how to be a leader and communicate expectations with the team.”

Caldwell is keen to emphasise that this was not typical of the coffee industry two decades ago – and largely isn’t today. However, she believes that positive experience can be a strong lesson for any hospitality business seeking to grow its team.

“If you hire leaders with a growth mindset, who can admit mistakes and know they’re not going to get things right 100% of the time – and match that with a safe environment for them to fail, learn and grow – then you have the best chance of success,” she says.

The university of life

For Elisa Marshall, co-founder of the celebrated New York bakery-café group, Maman, being a hospitality entrepreneur meant drawing on multiple professional backgrounds, including PR, marketing, wedding planning and restaurant management.

Marshall developed Maman (or ‘mother’ in French) with husband and fellow co-founder, Ben after they spotted a gap in New York’s dining scene for a cosy café and dining concept inspired by their nostalgia for home-cooked meals and baking.

“We found there was a lack of cafés and restaurants that felt really homely – everything was trying so hard to be cool and chic,” she says. “In a city like New York, so many people don’t have a dining room in their apartment, so we wanted to create a welcoming space at our venues.”
 

“Once you find the right people, it’s important that you invest in them”
Elisa Marshall, co-founder, Maman

Testament to the strength of that vision, Maman has successfully scaled its boutique concept to 39 venues and today employs more than 1,000 people. As the business has flourished, Marshall says effective hiring and HR have been hugely valuable learning experiences.

“As an entrepreneur, you wear every hat when you first start a business and being able to delegate takes a lot of trust and time,” Marshall says. “Once you find the right people, it’s important that you invest in them.”

The interior of a Maman outlet | Photo credit: Cinzia Orsina

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With consistency an imperative across stores in New York, Washington DC, Miami, and Philadelphia, Maman has formalised its team structure with a full-time head of HR and introduced staff handbooks at each location to ensure that both product and service remain on point. However, for Marshall, recruiting the right calibre of candidates from the outset is vital.

“Our philosophy is hiring personality first. We can teach anyone to make coffee or use a POS system, but we can’t teach you to smile or greet someone warmly when they walk in the door,” she explains.

It’s a sentiment echoed at Joe & The Juice, where warm, convivial service is an essential part of the brand’s DNA. “When I’m interviewing people, it’s less about what it says on your CV – clearly that is important too – but your personality is really the most important aspect because we want to provide a positive guest experience,” Nørøxe says.

With individual personality and attitude vital to building successful teams, Michael Butler argues that too many strong candidates with valuable soft skills are being automatically rejected by recruitment systems that filter based on rigid criteria such as tenure, experience and qualifications.

“I often hear that operators are struggling to fill vacancies, yet so many people are seeking jobs in hospitality. The disconnect stems from an over-reliance on automated recruitment systems, which prevents both parties from connecting.”

For Butler, good leadership and HR also means identifying problems with team performance and acting swiftly to address them. “We’re not very good at having tough conversations,” he says, noting that many restaurants fail to conduct proper employee reviews during the trial period.

“If someone’s not right, tell them in month one and try to bridge the gap between additional training and support that’s needed. If they’re still not right, don’t wait three months, because the rest of the team is carrying that person. There’s a balance to be found where you can create an environment with just enough pressure to drive excellence, while also providing enough support to achieve it,” he says.

Executing a hospitality vision requires a colossal feat of coordination between many areas of expertise ­– from finance departments to marketing teams, chefs, baristas, bartenders, servers and kitchen porters. However, dealing with individual personalities, opinions, circumstances and expectations makes team building one of the hardest elements to get right in hospitality.

Nevertheless, it’s vital your people are properly equipped to deliver that all-important brand promise. As legendary basketball player Michael Jordan once said: “Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.”

In an industry where every penny counts, getting the right leadership in place and hiring teams for the long term can make or break a business. The challenge is finding those unique individuals who will make your venue shine – not just today, but tomorrow and always. 
 

This article was first published in Issue 21 of 5THWAVE magazine.

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