Christmas in hospitality…It’s exciting, it’s busy and it’s an opportunity for a brilliant end to the year. It’s also a lot. More bookings, more customers, more pressure and more plates to keep spinning, sometimes literally.
So, when People Experience Hub and Oak Engage got together for a hospitality webinar, Enabling Hospitality Leaders to Deliver an Exceptional Christmas and Prepare for 2027, the focus was on exploring what happens to employee experience in hospitality when the pressure ramps up. People Experience Hub CEO, Nick Court was joined by Lucy Payne, Head of Customer Success at Oak Engage, and reward specialist Tori Lawson to talk about peak trading, employee recognition, frontline communication and how hospitality leaders can prepare their people strategy for the year ahead.
One idea kept cropping up throughout the conversation: when things get busy, don’t make people’s jobs harder.
One of the standout points from the conversation came from Tori Lawson: Christmas isn’t exactly a surprise. Yet when peak hits, some of the everyday things that make work enjoyable can suddenly slip down the list, and recognition is a perfect example.
When you’ve got customers waiting, bookings coming through and somebody has called in sick, remembering to tell someone they’ve done a brilliant job can easily become tomorrow’s problem. But recognition doesn’t need to mean another complicated Christmas initiative. It can be a genuine thank you after a tough shift, celebrating a team that has smashed a busy service or recognising someone who has stepped up when things haven’t gone to plan.
The takeaway from the conversation was simple: prepare ahead, give managers the tools they need and make saying thank you part of everyday culture.
Then we got onto communication, or perhaps more accurately, too much communication.
Hospitality employees don’t spend their shifts eagerly refreshing their inboxes. Someone working front of house doesn’t need to stop halfway through a busy service to read a huge company update, and someone working back of house doesn’t necessarily need exactly the same message delivered in exactly the same way.
Rather than asking “How do we communicate more?”, Lucy Payne, Head of Customer Success at Oak Engage, brought the conversation back to something much simpler: what’s actually relevant to this person right now?
That might mean quick updates, useful information and easy access, with managers adding the human bit through context, questions and conversation. It prompted a great comment from someone watching the session: “Less comms, more conversation.”
Of course, good communication isn’t just about what you tell people. It’s also about what happens when they tell you something.
Nick Court shared a brilliant example of a chef who was trying to do their job with blunt knives and poor equipment. They raised the issue and, the next day, their area manager turned up with new kit and an apology.
No six-month transformation project. No big presentation. Problem raised. Problem understood. Problem fixed.
Nick called it “culture in the moment”, and it summed up a much bigger point from the conversation. If you’re going to ask your people what’s getting in their way, you need to show them that you’ve actually heard them.
Leadership sparked another interesting discussion. Senior leaders obviously can’t spend every day in every pub, hotel or restaurant, and nobody was suggesting they should. But visibility isn’t necessarily about how often somebody turns up. It’s what they do when they’re there.
Nick shared a story about visiting an unexpectedly busy pub with a senior operational leader. Rather than standing back and observing, the leader took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves and started pulling pints. Nick got handed a cloth and sent off to clear tables.
Not quite the site visits they’d planned, but probably a much more valuable one.
The point wasn’t that every CEO needs to start pulling pints. It was that great leadership is about more than being seen. Don’t just turn up to see what’s happening. Understand what’s happening and help where you can.
Front of house, back of house, managers and support teams might experience very different working days, but they’re all contributing to the same customer experience.
That came through strongly in the webinar. Maybe everybody doesn’t need the same communication. Maybe everybody doesn’t need the same recognition. Maybe objectives need to look different depending on the realities of the role. But ultimately, everyone needs to understand what they’re collectively trying to achieve.
Because the customer doesn’t see departments. They just know whether they had a great experience.
Towards the end of the conversation, Nick put a simple question to Lucy and Tori: What’s one thing hospitality operators should do before Christmas, and what should they do in January?
Their answers were reassuringly similar.
Before Christmas, strip things back. Keep communications relevant, don’t suddenly launch something complicated, make recognition easy and give people what they need to get on with delivering a brilliant peak.
Then, in January, have the conversation. What worked? What drove everyone mad? What should you do differently? What should you absolutely do again? Most importantly, close the loop by showing your people what you’ve heard and what you’re going to do as a result.
Christmas will, after all, come around again next year.
We’ve picked out a few favourite moments here, but the full session goes much further into recognition, reward, communication, technology, leadership, front and back of house, and preparing your people strategy for what’s next.
So, grab a coffee and catch up on the full conversation - Watch the session on demand
Lucy Payne - Oak Engage
Lucy Payne is Head of Customer Success at Oak Engage, with experience spanning customer success, account management and business development. She works closely with organisations to strengthen employee experience and create more connected, engaged workforces, with a particular interest in how technology can better support and connect frontline employees.
Nick Court – People Experience Hub
Nick Court is CEO of People Experience Hub and a leading voice on employee listening, people analytics and workplace culture. With experience at Tesco, Carlsberg and Associated British Foods, Nick helps organisations look beyond employee feedback scores to understand what their people really think and feel, combining people science, AI-enabled insight and human expertise to turn insight into meaningful action.
Tori Lawson - Marston's Pubs
Tori Lawson is an experienced Reward leader with a background spanning Finance and HR. Her career has covered job architecture, benchmarking, pay governance, benefits and organisational change across manufacturing, logistics, retail, telecommunications and hospitality, with a strong focus on using data and insight to create fair, practical and commercially sustainable reward strategies.