There’s a moment most of us in hospitality have experienced. A new staff member finishes induction, seems to have it… and then, in the first real guest interaction, something is just slightly off. Not wrong enough to correct in the moment. Not quite right either. You move on. There’s too much else to deal with.
That moment, repeated enough times, is how standards shift. Not because anyone decided to lower them. Because the pressure to keep things running today makes it easy to defer the harder work of building people properly for tomorrow. And somewhere between 2019 and now, a lot of properties have been doing exactly that without quite realising it.
I sat in a room recently where operators from across the industry said this out loud. The Frontline Workforce Roundtable Series – hosted by FUEL in partnership with FEDHASA Inland at the Saxon Hotel on May 13 – brought together senior people from Accor, Radisson, Capital Hotels, Southern Sun, City Lodge, Minor Hotels and the Saxon. Competing brands, no agenda, genuinely honest. The line that opened the conversation – and came back at the end – was: “No one is coming to save us. We have to save ourselves.”
What the room put on the table was this: the bar for “good enough” has been moving and the industry has been moving with it. Training and L&D budgets have taken a disproportionate hit since 2019. The management layer that was lost during COVID hasn’t come back. The people who survived are carrying roles that used to belong to two or three others, which means there are fewer people inside properties making the case for serious investment in staff. And the labour pool has changed. Many entrants to hospitality today have never stayed in a four-star property. The service instincts that earlier generations brought in from lived experience now have to be taught from scratch in formats that actually work for the person in front of you, not a generic classroom average.
What is actually working
The session wasn’t a grievance forum. Alongside the hard truths, operators brought what they’ve found genuinely works.
On retention, the most consistent finding was simple: hire through your own people. When a staff member refers someone, they have real interest in seeing that person succeed. One participant described it as “a bit of indirect blackmail but it works”. The accountability that comes from a referral is something no formal induction programme replicates.
Several operators have moved to multi-year progression pathways – Youth Employment Service (YES) programme entry, into a fixed-term internship, into permanent placement – with each stage visible to the staff member from the start. The insight is straightforward: people who can see where they’re going are far less likely to leave for R200 more somewhere else.
Cross-skilling across departments, which many properties adopted out of necessity during COVID, has quietly become one of the better retention and talent tools available. Staff who work across the property develop a clearer sense of where they fit and where they can grow and managers start to see potential they would otherwise have missed. One example stayed with the room: a learner who chose to complete optional engineering content in her own time surfaced a career direction her manager had never considered.
The room also pushed back on generic onboarding. A YES entrant with no prior hospitality experience, a work-integrated graduate and an experienced hire from another property need fundamentally different journeys. Running all three through the same induction process is a waste the industry can no longer justify.
And perhaps the most counterintuitive point raised: train your people and let them go. The instinct to hold back development for fear of losing someone is understandable but the room was clear that the reverse is worse. People who aren’t growing disengage. Alumni become ambassadors. Many come back. Either way, the investment goes into the industry.
The thread running through all of it
Here is what struck me most sitting in that room. The practices that work – the ones operators kept returning to – were not primarily about systems or programmes. They shared a common thread: the quiet, daily evidence that someone in the building genuinely cares about the people who work there.
One participant put it this way: “If people believe you care about the things they are battling with at home, they are far more likely to care about the things you ask them to care about at work.”
Culture of belonging was the most consistently named retention lever in the room. Not a perk. Not a policy. The feeling that a person’s future is possible here. Operators who had built that culture reported lower turnover, stronger service and more resilient teams.
For an industry under genuine structural pressure, that is also a reason for real optimism. The most powerful retention lever available to hospitality is not something that has to be bought or outsourced. It is something this industry has always known how to provide.
What comes next
The conversation raised questions the room agreed deserve more attention:
- How to calculate the true cost of staff turnover (a number most hotel groups still don’t have)
- How to scale residential quality training at a fraction of the per-learner cost
- How to address rural and remote staffing as a shared industry challenge rather than each group’s private problem
- How to make the case for training investment to ownership and Boards in language that lands
These are not questions for one session. They are the reason this series exists.
The Frontline Workforce Roundtable is a monthly, closed-door series: eight operators, 90 minutes and no fixed agenda. Just the people who are running these properties, sharing what is actually working – and building, together, the thinking the industry needs.
The appetite in that first room to continue – and to widen the circle – was unanimous. No one is coming to save us. We have to save ourselves.
The conversation that started on May 13 is one of the ways we do exactly that.
