Formerly Professor of Food and Beverage and Service Operations Management at EHL, Ian Scarth has a background in strategic development and leadership within the hotel and hospitality sectors. In this article he gives his views on the culture of fear and bullying the hospitality industry has gained a reputation for. He aims to shed light on our sector which is struggling with the contradiction between its core purpose of offering hospitality and the often-highlighted bullying - yet to be eliminated from parts of our industry.
According to the dictionary, 'Bullying' is defined as “Seeking to harm, intimidate, or coerce someone perceived as vulnerable”, while ACAS define it as “offensive, intimidating, malicious or insulting behaviour, an abuse or misuse of power through means that undermine, humiliate, denigrate or injure the recipient.”
The same dictionary suggests Hospitality is “The friendly, graceful, and generous reception and entertainment of guests, visitors, or strangers.”
Anyone reading these definitions must surely conclude that it's impossible to be hospitable if at the same time one is a bully. Yet the hospitality industry appears to have a bad reputation for bullying and in some cases harassing its employees. How and why have we earnt this reputation and what can we do to change this perception of our industry?
Let’s hope, those chefs with real leadership competencies prevail, demonstrating how it’s very possible to lead a kitchen brigade without having to bully or use a tsunami of swear words to achieve quality. Rather fostering an environment of creativity through care.
It is a fact that the UK’s courts spend a lot of time hearing industrial tribunal cases from the hospitality sector that are linked to mistreatment (harassment) of employees. Some of these are won and some are lost, but the most damaging are the goalless draws, settled out of court in an effort to sweep any bullying under the carpet, out of the gaze of customers, public and the press.
Then there’s employee word-of-mouth which travels through the recruitment market like a wildfire on steroids, via sites like Glassdoor and in the press. Research in the USA by Schedulehead suggests that ex-hospitality workers leave the industry for eight main reasons:
To develop a positive working environment, it's important to establish clear policies for escalating bad behaviour from co-worker’s, management, or customers. Proactively look for feedback from your current employees and model healthy workplace behaviours from management downward. Beyond the obvious, employees appreciate a workplace with transparent communication, approachable management, and clear direction”.
Liz Rosling for SME Loans writes “Whilst bullying isn’t classed as illegal under the Equality Act 2010, harassment is. The problem is that there are often a number of overlaps between harassment and bullying – where harassment is more direct, bullying is often less obvious, more subtle and psychological. The ACAS helpline receives over 20,000 calls annually. These calls reveal that bullying manifests in a wide variety of ways, having serious impacts on individual wellbeing, business performance and the UK economy as a whole.
After surveying 2,000 UK based employees on their experiences at work to date, our findings revealed that 23% of the British workforce has been bullied at work, and that almost 1 in 4. 25% have been made to feel left out in the workplace”. The law states that harassment has taken place when unwanted behaviour has been used in relation to one of the following: age, sex, gender, marriage and civil partnerships, pregnancy/maternity, disability, race, religion, and sexual orientation.
Modern leadership teachings suggest trust, respect, honesty, kindness, empathy, inclusion and humanity should be the catalysts used to drive performance. These elements, if properly defined and integrated into company culture, will greatly reduce any risk of harassment taking place. Gone are the days when aggressive micromanagement and bullying can achieve the results we desire. They will only push up already disturbing turnover rates We must have clear zero-tolerance approaches to these negative practices.
There is no doubt many hospitality companies have recognised this challenge and are doing great work to change past negative practices and improve our industry’s image. They clearly know that bullying and harassment are wrong and are not characteristics they want to be associated with. Our industry has enough to deal with, it certainly doesn’t need a self-inflicted harmful reputation.
Over recent years, hotel and restaurant companies have started to win high-profile awards for being great employers, yet these companies still struggle to recruit the volume or stature of people they need. Their commitment and effort is being overshadowed by the perception of the wider industry. While the good guys may attract team members from other, less people-focused hospitality companies, they can do little to win staff away from (or leaving to join) other industries that are seen as being more people focused.
How does our fragmented industry pull together to tackle this problem, so the sector is perceived as a long-term, safe career bet in the eyes of future school leavers, parents, and career advisors? That’s a bigger challenge than I have the ability or foresight to address in this article. However, I do want to ask all hospitality companies to look at their practices and processes around bullying and set policies to ensure these practices are eliminated for good, replacing them where needed with more modern leadership approaches built around empathy, kindness, and recognition.
Enhancing the appeal of the hospitality sector to potential employees is a major challenge. It will require continued effort from both SMEs and multinationals, the length and breadth of the country (and beyond). Today’s benchmark employers and industry bodies need to challenge the mindset of those that still believe the stick, is better than the carrot. Such people or organizations belong to a bygone era, in which the bully believed he or she was all things to all people, often afraid to admit failure or weakness, refusing to give away any power or authority. In other word’s they ruled through fear.
These days, we know that failure and the sharing of power and knowledge are an essential part of the learning/improvement process. We also know that a no-fear culture is critical to enhance openness, drive innovation and cultivate necessary change, which will in turn keep organisations competitive. Leaders of today’s organisations must focus on creating more leaders, rather than keeping their followers under tight control.
As recently as last year I witnessed a Senior Manager telling a subordinate, “I command you,” when emphasising an instruction the junior staff member felt was unreasonable. Clearly, if military style terms are being used to bully people into doing things they are not comfortable with, the old ways have not disappeared completely.
In short, encourage and build a culture based on powerful emotional intelligence. We must always remember that it’s the bully who is actually the sick person, not the vulnerable person being bullied, and that true hospitality cannot be delivered by an unwell person overseeing a culture of fear. You need to be both a carer and a server to be hospitable and a true leader. The offensive, intimidating, malicious or insulting bully has no place in an industry whose entire reason for being is to be friendly, graceful, and generous to people.