Last week, this hack learned the phrase “social fitness”, and yes, I learned it from a podcast. What the writer/chit chatter had to say started off predictably, with data showing how Americans spend more time on their own than ever before (and if you share no traits with Americans, look away now) but that loneliness had not risen. This was because, although they/we were spending more time “actively engaged” with their/our pets than people, they/we were also texting/WhatsApping/piling on Elon Musk on X. We still interacted. 

But it’s low-value interaction. And taking us back to social fitness, the point was made that 30 years ago, nutrition meant getting the right number of calories per day. Now we know that it means getting the right balance of nuts/berries/rotting cabbage. We should start thinking the same about social interactions, with WhatsApp the equivalent of a packet of crisps and going to a party – something that scores you 400 Zoe points. 

The hospitality sector has fallen foul of nutrition scoring before, but does this mean you can get a government grant to go down to the pub and ensure your five a day? Something for UKHospitality to consider. That there is a hierarchy of social interaction is not fresh to the sector, but the idea that if we sit around for 30 years then the government might start running campaigns supporting it is appealing.

While we wait for that, are we doing enough to provide that essential social interaction? The hotel sector has been trying to extend its tentacles into our every moment, having appreciated that just having us under its sway while we’re unconscious is causing it to miss out on some revenue streams.

French group Accor, with its brief foray into self-driving cars fitted with exercise bikes, has set itself up as the sector’s innovators. Its strategy is “augmented hospitality”. This, again, needed a podcast to tease out the truth of the matter, as augmented takes us right back to Musk and his plan to insert chips in our brains.

Accor’s take on augmented hospitality is that it wants to understand consumers and offer travel and lifestyle experiences that are clustered into three categories: live, work and play. It says: “Augmented hospitality means anticipating a customer’s every need. Whether organising upscale events, delivering personalised services, creating unique experiences or offering digital solutions, Accor’s vision of augmented hospitality is not just about planning for tomorrow, it is about designing tomorrow.”

Looking past the “designing tomorrow” comment, which is all a bit flying cars and Epcot Centre, what Accor wants is to be there all the time, every day, no matter what you’re doing. To this end, it briefly offered to look after your aged relatives and put them on trains if you were too busy to do it yourself. But any leader will tell you that not every idea is a great one.

What it means in practice is that Accor has, among other things (including tens of hotel brands), a co-working brand, an events company, sponsorship of Paris Saint Germain and its name over a concert arena. Accor’s loyalty scheme holds all this together, with the idea that you can trade points for lattes, building that daily interaction. It’s not alone in this – Marriott has a points deal with Starbucks. 

The hotel sector is eager to sweep up all hospitality’s consumers, moving more deeply into events, overhauling food and beverage with a view to locals and reviving the interest in destination bars it kicked off with the American Bar at the Savoy. If everyone else wants to reclaim their customer, is it time to think about how to be everything, everywhere all at once?

Moves were made towards this during the pandemic when we were all drinking in gutters and getting into takeaway. Some brands – PizzaExpress, Nando’s, Wagamama – have been taking their products to supermarkets. But think back to all that Zoom drinking. Some companies were briefly developing virtual reality dining options to bring their offering into your home – with the help of delivery. You can hang out with your friends without leaving the sofa. It may not earn you 400 Zoe points on the social fitness scale, but it’s surely the equivalent of an oily fish salad. And staying in while Storm *insert latest name here* is raging sure is appealing, as CGA’s January figures showed. 

Alternative realities might not be for you, but there is merit to wondering what your customer is up to every moment of every day and how you can insert yourself. If you don’t have the firepower of a global hotel company to buy a co-living brand, partnerships with local businesses that fill in a space you’re not offering can help build that contact. It needn’t be complicated. Accor had huge success with a hotel next to a motorbike parking space: it charged €5 for a latte and day’s care of your helmet. It’s time to think of our sector not as an indulgence, but as a route to fitness. 

Ikea’s new store in London’s Oxford Street has just received the highest number of applications for jobs ever for the global retailer, as it was flooded with 3,730 applications for just 150 roles. This incredible number was received within only five days of posting, and such was the influx of CVs that the application process had to be shut down.

 

Retail and hospitality continue to be the perennial laggards in being recognised as attractive places to work, and they certainly don’t come anywhere near the top of the pile for sectors people would choose to carve out a career.

 

It is therefore mightily impressive that Ikea was able to pull in so many applications at levels that would undoubtedly be welcomed by any company within any sector. Ikea has achieved this by standing out from the crowd with a proposition that makes it an attractive employer – especially at the entry-level. 

 

Among the characteristics that have contributed to its appeal is the obvious one of competitive rates of pay. But beyond the money, there is the promise of providing multi-skilled roles, whereby people work across different departments, flexible work arrangements, perks such as subsidised food (that goes beyond just meatballs), and its strong commitment to sustainability that particularly chimes with Generation Z.

 

Not only do such aspects clearly prove successful at pulling in the applications for new roles – and help Ikea take its pick from a great mix of candidates – but it also helps with retention that in turn reduces turnover, which is so costly to businesses. These are factors that the hospitality sector is keenly focused on as labour costs continue to increase. Maintaining a stable, engaged and well-trained workforce is now more important than ever. It ultimately drives better customer satisfaction.

 

Much is made of the influx of automation and technology along with redesigns of restaurants to accommodate the likes of delivery and kiosks – particularly at the quick service restaurant (QSR) end – as a route to boosting efficiency. Significantly less is made of the fact that these actions can also massively improve the work environment for employees.

 

Increasingly, restaurant operators in the US are investing in technology that directly influences the way their employees work and prosper. The changes to working practices are not merely fortunate side effects of introducing the technology. 

 

Chick-fil-A in Atlanta garnered much media attention for its elevated drive-thru prototype that is full of the latest state-of-the-art kit and specially designed layout for maximum efficiency, but Jonathan Reed, executive director of design, says the restaurant is just as much about improving the lives of the team.

 

“We want to keep employees excited and engaged,” he said. “We know team member engagement is a predictor of customer satisfaction. You can do the math; you can see it. So, we’re intentional with our design and had team member input with the design.”

 

This manifested itself in some simple aspects such as having windows near the pot-washing station and a lounge area for employees. At Just Salad, the brand’s first drive-thru does not yet have voice artificial intelligence, but instead uses a simple audible alert for the team when a car enters the drive-thru lane. This is hardly hi-tech stuff, but it makes employees’ lives easier.

 

At Itsu, the interaction between front of house and kitchen was improved by simply replacing wording on the screens with images of the dishes that needed to be prepared. Using pictures in a busy kitchen at lunchtime is much better than a frazzled team reading a small font on digital screens.

 

There are many other similar examples of processes and solutions being introduced into the QSR sector that improve the lives of employees, but this is not the only part of hospitality where changes are taking place. In Michelin star kitchens, it is more about an ongoing mind-set and culture change. They were once a stronghold of aggressive sink-or-swim cultures, but over the years, the macho behaviour has been exorcised and the welfare of team members has become much more of a consideration.

 

Another brick was taken out of the old wall with the recent publication of a “manifesto” of sorts by Jun Tanaka, co-owner of Michelin-starred restaurant The Ninth, who recalled his years of unhappy experiences working in elite kitchens that were fuelled by intimidation and where empathy was in short supply. Having grown up in that environment, he sought to create a very different workplace with The Ninth, and having achieved success with this more caring model, he is keen to share his practices and put another nail in the coffin of the old ways.

 

Whether it is through the adoption of new mind-sets or embracing new operational practices through cutting-edge technology, these are all contributing to improving workplaces that are helping put the hospitable into hospitality. 

A chief marketing officer (CMO) I placed a few years ago in a leading hospitality business shared with me late last year that her daughter was encouraging her to pursue her long-held dream of becoming a chief executive (CEO). “You should go for it, mum!”, she apparently told her. “You’ve spent your whole career working so hard to get where you are – and now there’s just one letter to go!” The one-letter difference between CMO and CEO might be minimal on paper, but the leap from functional to general management is huge. Having reflected on it over the past few months and also canvassed the views of a number of successful current and former CEOs, presidents and managing director/general managers, below, I outline what I see as the key challenges and share some tips on how to make a successful transition.

 

The most obvious intellectual challenge of becoming a CEO is that the job is so much broader and more demanding than any functional role, but there are no more hours in the day to do it. As there’s less time to dedicate to each issue, this requires asking lots of questions to understand the issues at hand and drawing upon the skills and knowledge of others. Leaders must balance achieving short-term results while ensuring long-term growth. This requires quickly getting to grips with how the different parts of the business fit together, dedicating a significant portion of their time to strategy and effectively allocating capital, talent and time across functions and projects to deliver the plan. To hold their own with the chief financial officer and shareholders, the new CEO needs a detailed understanding of the P&L, cash flow and balance sheet. 

 

By far the biggest intellectual challenge has to do with a) no longer being the expert, and b) plugging one’s own functional knowledge and skill gaps. A president I spoke to who was internally promoted said that, in order to show his team he was hungry to learn from them and to truly empower his successor (whom they specifically ensured was a star player who would push the president out of their “home function”), in the first few years of their role, they over-indexed their time more on the functions they knew least about and under-indexed it on those they knew intimately.

 

While the role of any CEO is to deliver business success, the team and broader organisation are looking to them to provide the wider context; and to set, role-model and lead a positive culture so they can feel motivated by the journey ahead. One managing director told me: “A CEO needs their team to walk over hot coals for them, so a large proportion of their time should be dedicated to culture-building.” Another managing director’s top tip for success was: “Lead from behind when times are good – and from the front when times are tough!”

 

Being a successful CEO requires building effective relationships with, and learning from, one’s top team, asking how to best support them and co-creating a plan. As one CEO said: “It’s important not to go charging in with an opinion, but to spend lots of time talking to people up front, travelling, listening, engaging, understanding what’s at stake. A listening tour followed by the quick resolution of a handful of key issues will give people confidence that the new CEO is not just happy to listen, but also to act. This will hopefully create a positive culture and followship.”

 

To deliver the strategic plan, it’s critical for a new CEO to have a high-calibre team they can trust and hold accountable. A former CEO said: “You must surround yourself with exceptional people who are better than you, who will challenge you and who will fill your gaps. A senior functional leader can sometimes get by with merely solid people underneath them; a new CEO can't compensate for any people weaknesses in the same way and needs the best team they can possibly assemble.” Whereas functional roles mostly entail managing across and down, most first-time leaders, particularly CEOs, realise a lot of their new role is about managing up and out. As such, the consensus seems to be that a CEO should spend at least 25% of their time attending to their stakeholders, whether it’s the board, shareholders or other external parties. 

 

As counter-intuitive as it may sound for someone who has just been promoted into their first CEO role – for many, the culmination of a professional dream – making the step can be a tough, even humbling experience. Several CEOs I spoke to said they knew moving from functional to general management would be an intellectual challenge but weren’t prepared for it to be such an emotional one.

 

Why is this? In addition to suddenly feeling (and, indeed, being) under the microscope, having to take on a more intense travel schedule and keep their counsel (which, in itself, can produce a sense of loneliness), there is also the fact that admitting one’s functional knowledge gaps, taking steps to close them and showing up without excessive pride or fear, requires self-awareness, vulnerability humility and work. It’s often the first time a leader has had to own their own development.

 

Add to this a far greater weight on one’s shoulders because a) the newly-promoted CEO is required to make decisions in unfamiliar territory, and b) for the first time, the buck stops with them – both of which it’s natural to feel wrong-footed by. To help with this, ideally before they start the role, the new CEO should push for the resources they need to succeed, be this staffing the team with experienced stars, capital to properly pursue growth goals, or funding an external executive coach. 

 

In light of the above, moments of self-doubt are natural. As a CEO said to me: “My coach told me that every day for the first year in my new role, I’d think I was going to be fired. He was wrong: it was at least three years before I realised I wasn’t going to be!” A former CEO told me: “After any promotion, there’s a gap between one’s standing as perceived by others and conferred by the role itself, and one’s self-image. Self-doubt stems from the gap between these two things, and if unchecked, can lead to ‘imposter syndrome’. Time is a good healer for this gap, and what can really help is leveraging the advice of people who’ve successfully made a similar transition.”

 

What’s in a letter, then? Quite a lot, it turns out! General management is not an incremental career step; it’s more like crossing the Rubicon. The challenges are intellectual and people-related, for sure, but I’d suggest the greatest challenge is managing oneself. Knowing what to expect and receiving advice and support from people who’ve successfully made the move should make it as enjoyable as it can be – and boost one’s chances of success.