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HOTEL BUSINESS REVIEW

MAY FOCUS: Eco-Friendly Practices

 

Why Empathy Should Be Part of Your Hotel's Communication Plan

By Deborah Popely Assistant Professor, School of Hospitality Management, Kendall College | May 2021

The hospitality industry has long placed a priority on empathy as a foundation for quality service.  Empathy is a necessary skill for establishing the human connection at the heart of the hospitality experience.  It is empathy that helps transform the hospitality encounter from a mere economic transaction to a reciprocal relationship with psychological, social and cultural dimensions. 

Empathy is an important component of the SERVQUAL model widely used to measure strengths and weaknesses in the delivery of hospitality services.   By empathy, we mean the ability to identify with the thoughts or feelings of another as if they were one's own.  Anticipating the needs of others and acting to meet them is the essence of empathy in the hospitality environment. 

Empathy and how individuals and businesses express it has taken on new importance in light of recent events. Hotel leaders were called upon to relate empathetically to guests and employees throughout the pandemic, assuaging their concerns and acting to mitigate suffering from layoffs, closures and service restrictions.  In the midst of last summer's protests, hotel leaders were further challenged to demonstrate sensitivity to racial equity to both internal and external audiences. 

Many hotels were located in city centers where protests were ongoing.  Some leaders were called upon to address highly emotional and dramatic situations affecting staff and guests while trying to maintain operations to the best of their abilities. In our research, more than one hotel executive talked about the need to draw on reserves of empathy to have "courageous conversations" and provide moral leadership in the aftermath of these events.

There are multiple dimensions of empathy to be considered, and each delivers its own value.  "Affective" empathy refers to feeling other's feelings or experiences as if they were one's own; "cognitive" empathy involves taking in the perspective of another, seeing a situation through their eyes; and "conative" empathy involves actively working to reduce the suffering of another. 

Delivering hospitality exercises all three forms of empathy, but it is the latter form (conative empathy) that is most in demand right now.  The public is calling on business leaders to get off the sidelines and demonstrate empathy for marginalized groups in both words and deeds.  This is distinct from sympathy, which is usually expressed in the form of pity ("thoughts and prayers"), reflecting goodwill but stopping short of taking action to alleviate the other person's pain.

The longstanding inequities that became such a focal point in 2020 are likely to remain in the public consciousness through 2021 and beyond.  This is over and above the long-term trend showing a preference for brands that demonstrate ethical concern on issues such as climate change and human trafficking.  Hotel brands should be cognizant of the public hunger for transparent empathetic communication, particularly with respect to social justice.  This phenomenon was recently on display as more than 100 corporations, among them tourism businesses such as Delta Airlines and Starbucks, reacted to legislation aimed at restricting voting in Georgia. 

Accenture's Fjords Trend Report for 2021 asserted that responding to these forces, organizations will need to be empathetic and be seen to behave as such to their employees and customers, while striving to be profitable in their daily operations.  The authors further observed that brands carefully consider their actions and messaging as they attempt to communicate care and compassion to diverse audiences. 

Establishing a culture of empathy tied to core values and modeling behavior from the CEO and top leaders of the company is an important first step.   In the hotel industry, the global nature of our operations and the diversity of our employees and clientele make this a topic of urgent importance to leadership.  There are numerous examples that can be cited at the corporate level.  

For instance, Hyatt President and CEO Mark Hoplamazian has identified empathy as the foundation of its service design, talent development and guest engagement strategies during and post-pandemic.  This includes an increased focus on "leading inclusively and creating the right environment for colleagues wellbeing".  Marriott's corporate website makes it clear that "diversity and inclusion is fundamental to our core values and strategic business goals. Taking care of people and their well-being is our most precious cultural inheritance".

In his messages to associates and the larger community, the late Marriott CEO Arne Sorenson lived out this philosophy, modeling empathy and compassion in every word. In their tributes to him, other hotel CEOs remarked on his unerring ability to communicate kindness, compassion and commitment to social progress.  IHG's Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Report sets out ambitious targets for 2030 that cut across such equity issues such as striving for gender and ethnic balance in leadership positions, creating culture of inclusion throughout the supply chain, prioritizing associates' well-being and promoting human rights. The goals are backed up with specific commitments to take action in multiple ways.   In the report, IHG CEO Keith Barr states :

"We've chosen to focus on equity alongside diversity and inclusion because we know how important it is to not have one without the others, and we recognise that society increasingly feels this way, too.  Equity means making sure everyone has access to the same opportunities, by recognising and taking action to address any barriers that exist for them. We're clear in our commitment as a company to ensure we're fair in how we treat, compensate and develop our colleagues". 

Managers at the property level must translate these directive into effective policy and communication for their teams and guests.  In whatever way a leader chooses addresses this topic, it needs to be transparent, respectful and above all empathetic.

To be sure, the hospitality industry is by no means without controversies of its own when it comes to how it treats its workforce and customers.  The history of low pay, insecure shift work, harassment and exploitation can make even the most heartfelt efforts by corporations to embrace empathy and equity ring hollow.  Until workers feel the same sense of safety and well-being as guests, the playing field will remain lopsided.  Moreover, there is strong evidence in the literature that employees' perception of organizational justice is correlated with relationship quality and by extension job performance (1).

These are just a few of the reasons that the first order of business should be to focus on getting our own house in order so that employees can believe our message of empathy and spread it beyond our walls as advocates and co-creators of the service experience.  If we are able to do so, empathetic and equitable treatment of guests is more likely to follow, minimizing some of the lapses that can occur during the millions of interactions between the givers and receivers of our services on a daily basis.  

There may even be potential for the hospitality industry to take a leadership role in helping to increase the degree of mutual respect and caring in society as a whole.  Hospitality is often equated with offering kindness, comfort, shelter and sustenance to the stranger.  "Breaking bread" is a metaphor for overcoming differences by sharing a meal.  Tourism studies suggest that the very act of creating a safe and friendly environment for all customers, treating them with kindness and respect, can in and of itself be a force for promoting cross-cultural understanding.   Tourism scholars have argued that "empathy can lead people from dominant ethnicities to become of aware of their privilege and thus open up the possibility for structural change" (2).   As a "moral encounter" hospitality can be an engine for social progress and a force for cross-cultural understanding, empathy and peace (3). 

On an educational level, the practice and study of hospitality can be a tool for increasing empathetic behaviors.  It has been observed that in service learning, engagement with the community makes it harder to maintain prejudices, stereotypes and narrow thinking (4).  As the world becomes more global and the nature of the service environment continues to evolve, it is incumbent on institutions of higher education to recognize empathy as a skill that should be purposefully cultivated in our hospitality management graduates through immersive experiences in diverse settings (5).  As no-touch service protocols and technology-enabled communication in the hospitality industry increase, it will be important to determine how human interaction and relationship-building can be retained as essential characteristics of the hospitality experience.

It may seem like a stretch to call upon an industry as large and as varied as hospitality to take on such challenges.  Certainly we have the training and opportunity to be agents for the greater good if we have the inclination.  Enhancing empathy skills in staff at all levels within the operation is a great place to start.  Hilton corporation is using virtual reality training modules to enhance the management team's empathy for frontline workers and guests (12).  In addition, hotels and other hospitality businesses will need to give strong consideration to how they will frame empathy and equity messages in their corporate communications and how they will ensure that associates live out those values in their interactions with guests and one another on the ground. 

 

References:

1. Chao-jun Li, Kuo-Kuang Chang & Shih-Ming Ou | Juan Ignacio Pulido-Fernández (Reviewing editor) (2020) The relationship between hotel staff's organizational justice perception, relationship quality and job performance, Cogent Social Sciences, 6:1, DOI: 10.1080/23311886.2020.1739953

2. Davis, K. C. (2004), 'Oprah's book club and the politics of cross-racial empathy', International Journal of Cultural Studies, 7:4, pp. 399–419.

3. Caton, K. (2014), 'Humanism and tourism: A moral encounter', in M. Mostafanezhad and K. Hannam (eds), Moral Encounters in Tourism, Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, pp. 17–30.

4. Stratman, J. (2013). Toward a Pedagogy of Hospitality: Empathy, Literature, and Community Engagement.  Journal of Education and Christian Belief, 17:1 (2013), 25 – 29.

5. Dominguez, G.  and Herrera, F.A., (2020). Learning framework for the development of key skills in the hospitality industry. International Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Studies, 1(2), 127-139.


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Hotel Newswire is a newswire service that distributes press releases on behalf of our users. If you decide to submit a press release for distribution through our system we will transmit your entire press release including any personal information therein contained to our media contacts and online distribution points including search engines. This is the only redistribution of your information that we engage in. Your submission of press releases through our system indicates consent with this policy. The information we collect during your registration process is used to notify users about updates to our service and inform users of any special events hosted by Hotel Newswire. This information is not shared with other organizations for commercial or non-commercial purposes.

Cookies: Our system requires the use of cookies to enable the user to log back into our website to access information from the newswire, without having to log in each time using the required username and password.

If you do not want to receive email from us in the future, please let us know by following instructions included in our communication with you. Users who supply us with telephone numbers online may receive telephone contact from us regarding their account, or informing them of new products and services available on the HotelExecutive website. If you do not wish to receive such telephone calls, please edit your account and remove your phone number from your account profile. This can be done from your user account menu.

Ad Servers: We do not partner with or have any relationship with any ad server companies. From time to time, we may use customer information for new uses not previously disclosed in our privacy notice. If our information practices change at any time, we will post the policy changes to our website to notify you of these changes and provide you with the ability to opt out of these new uses. If you are concerned about how your information is used, you should check back at our website periodically.

Upon request we provide site visitors with access to all information (including proprietary information) that we maintain about them. Users can access this information by logging in to their account.

Security: We always use industry-standard encryption technologies while transferring and receiving user data exchanged with our site. We have appropriate security measures in place in our physical facilities to protect against the loss, misuse, or alteration of information that we have collected from you on our site. We do not store credit card information in our systems.

If you feel that this site is not following its stated information policy, you may contact us.

Sergio Bocci Comfort & Style: a Look at Hilton Anaheim's Full-Property Renovation
  • By Sergio Bocci, General Manager, Hilton Anaheim

    • At Hilton Anaheim, we operate with one goal in mind: to provide our guests with an experience that feels equal parts comfortable and distinctly local. We understand our guests arrive in the heart of Orange County with expectations—whether they are here on a family vacation, attending a major convention, or simply seeking a peaceful escape. We considered these different scenarios when planning our renovation so we could meet and exceed those expectations in every way possible. When we began the project, we asked ourselves: How can we create an environment that is not only visually stunning but also enhances...

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Blima Ehrentreu Invisible Design: How Thoughtful Interiors Can Reduce Operational Costs in Hospitality
  • By Blima Ehrentreu, Founder & CEO, The Designers Group

    • When people think of design in hospitality spaces, the conversation often focuses on the showpieces — the lobby statement chandelier, the textured wallcovering behind the front desk, or the bold color palette in a guest suite. These elements create the initial wow factor that guests remember and often appear in marketing materials or design awards. While those visual moments shape first impressions, the most impactful design decisions are often the ones guests never consciously notice. These choices happen quietly in the background and become part of the operational fabric of a property. They influence how efficiently, sustainably, and profitably the...

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Jennifer Nagy Trustonomics: the Currency of Success in the Hospitality Tech Industry
  • By Jennifer Nagy, President, JLNPR Inc.

    • Especially in today’s increasingly competitive hospitality technology market, trust and credibility is one of the most important factors in ensuring profitability over the long term. When a potential customer sees your company as credible and trustworthy, it can drastically shorten the sales cycle because they already know and trust your company/solution; as such, they are considered a “warm lead” and so your sales team can skip the initial “getting to know you” stage of the purchase cycle and move right into the important next steps. Customers who already trust your brand will require less convincing, more readily accept...

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Henry Farr Is Franchising the Key to Success in the Hotel Industry?
  • By Henry Farr, Valuation Director, Brand Finance

    • Franchise agreements are a common strategy in the hotel industry, offering a pathway for rapid expansion without the need for significant capital investment. Under a franchise agreement, the franchisor (the hotel brand) allows the franchisee (the hotel owner) to operate a hotel under its brand name, following its standards and guidelines. In exchange, the franchisee pays fees to the franchisor, which may include initial franchise fees, ongoing royalties, and marketing contributions. In some cases, the franchisor also provides operational services through a management contract. This model is particularly appealing to franchisees because it provides instant brand recognition, access to a...

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Cynthia Schuler Nurturing Diversity and Inclusion in the Hospitality Industry
  • By Cynthia Schuler, Principal, IntegriStar HR Consulting

    • Before promoting an environment of diversity and inclusion, leaders in the hospitality industry must support the mission of creating and nurturing internal environments that are diverse and inclusive where all employees will thrive and successfully serve their external clients at an optimal level. To nurture diversity and inclusion, leaders must first commit to the mission of building a diverse workforce to service diverse clients. Only then will they be able to build their strategic plan around the vision of the organization as it relates to diversity and inclusion. Leaders will then have the ability to integrate diverse, equitable, and inclusive...

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Samantha Markiewicz Summer of Fun: How to Use Social Media to Influence Summer Bookings
  • By Samantha Markiewicz, Vice President, Digital , Bread & Butter

    • Last summer, it felt like the whole world was on an endless and fabulous Euro trip between the months of May through September. Every time you opened the Instagram or TikTok app, you were met with serene scenes of azure water, umbrella-dotted beaches, and aperol spritzes. This year, consumers will be looking to plan summer travel starting in early April, and hotel marketers can use popular social media tools to capture attention, Drive discovery across social and brand websites, and ultimately influence consumers to book a stay ahead of the summer travel rush. Ask Core Audience What They WantInstagram...

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Amy McDonald The ROI of Wellness
  • By Amy McDonald, Principal & CEO , Under a Tree Consultancy

    • Wellness is reshaping hospitality and real estate. It is no longer a luxury; it is a global economic force and a core business strategy. The global wellness economy reached $6.3 trillion in 2023 and is projected to hit $9 trillion by 2028, according to the Global Wellness Economy Monitor by the Global Wellness Institute (GWI). Of the 11 categories of wellness, the three (3) key growth areas include Wellness Real Estate, Wellness Tourism, and Mental Wellness, sectors now recognized as essential drivers in hospitality and real estate. McKinsey & Company’s 2024 Future of Wellness study is titled “The wellness...

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