What Hospitality Really Means at Work

You can make your coffee at home or walk to the break room and make it yourself. So why do people so often pay another person to make them a cup of coffee?

Part of the answer is craft. They’re delivering a better product, and there is real skill behind crafting each beverage. But the bigger part is what happens while the coffee is ordered and made. The barista might remember who you are and your usual order. In a small way, they validate your existence as a human being because hospitality holds a unique power to shape experience in a way few things do.

I think about that whenever I see the word hospitality in a request for proposal, which is happening more and more, including for services at sites where you would not expect it. I was recently on a call about a data center with only 12 people working on site, and hospitality was still on the agenda. Some of that interest may be because hospitality is in the zeitgeist and organizations hear what their peers discuss. But something real resides beneath the hype.

Most firms have now settled their return-to-office expectations; the minimum days are set and the policy conversation is largely finished. What comes next is more difficult. Once people are in the building, what is the workplace actually providing them?

Hospitality is Everywhere

The simplest answer I can offer is “hospitality,” or the actions taken in recognition of a fellow human being with particular needs if they are to achieve their goals for the day.

Defined that way, the responsibility of hospitality cannot reside with one element of a facility services or workplace experience team. It shows up across engineering, cleaning, food and beverage and, most obviously, front-of-house teams. But everyone is responsible in part for helping to build a culture where hospitality acts as a throughline for each interaction.

Hospitality provides an important distinction between what is seen and unseen, and people tend to notice a failure of unseen hospitality first. Nobody compliments a clean bathroom, functioning air conditioning or Wi-Fi that connects on the first try. Those things are intended to be invisible; you only notice them when they stop working, and by then the damage has already been done.

Small Hospitality Signals

Anytime I walk into a restaurant, I have an Anthony Bourdain-inspired habit. Before anything else, I go and look at the bathroom. Bourdain’s logic is sound: if nobody has paid attention to the state of the bathroom, you should think twice about eating what comes out of the kitchen.

But there is a second layer to it. If the design and the effort stop at the bathroom door, that tells you something about every space in the building that guests do not see.

A lot of organizations assume unseen hospitality like modern restrooms, pleasant employee breakrooms and clean storage rooms is expensive. In my experience, it usually requires planning, forethought and ongoing care far more than it requires a massive budget.

Some of the best hospitality I have ever experienced has been in a local restaurant or a mid-tier hotel. What made it good was attentive staff, attention to detail, clear expectations and the sense that someone made an effort. None of that is a function of how much money was spent.

Generosity of spirit and generosity of expenditure are two different things, and only one of them is critical. That matters for organizations that lack the budget to build a flagship café — they may not need one anyway. It’s less about how much you spend on the workplace environment, and more about whether the people in it can tell that someone planned for and care about their arrival.

The Purpose of the Workplace

The Four Seasons articulates this idea as well as anyone: take care of your people and they take care of your customers. Union Square Hospitality Group puts it another way: your first client is your own team. In other words, because a worker is considered and cared for, the person being served by the worker is also considered and cared for.

The same logic applies inside a workplace, and it aligns with a question people are still debating: what is the true purpose of the office?

Recently, I had a discussion with a friend who made the case that most of what we’ve historically done together in person can now be done separately thanks to technology. My position remains the same, in that you learn to be a banker by being around other bankers. He told me he was an engineer, and that engineers work with their heads down.

I asked him whether he has friends at the firm where he works, and he said yes. I asked whether he regularly speaks with them, whether they helped his career, and whether those relationships mattered both personally and professionally. His answer was yes, every time.
A handful of relationships formed in a shared space has fully shaped the nature of his working life. In my view, this isn’t a small return on investment.

Where Relationships Thrive

Here is the part that gets overlooked. Those relationships are not usually built during a meeting, but five minutes beforehand.

A good front-of-house team makes sure meetings end on time and that the room is reset for the next group. That sounds purely operational, but what it actually produces is five minutes at the start of a meeting where people can talk casually before the agenda begins. It’s where someone says the strategy has shifted or asks a colleague to pick up a piece of work or simply catches up on a personal level; it also encourages the conversation to continue for a few minutes after the meeting’s end.

None of that happens if the room is still occupied, if the previous group ran long or if the space was not cleaned. When people are preoccupied with whether the conference room is dirty or whether it is even available, the interaction that justified coming in never occurs.

Create the appropriate conditions and those exchanges happen on their own. Fail to create them, and people come to an obvious conclusion: “this wasn’t worth my time.”

What Hospitality Can Do in the Workplace

Hospitality is not a line item or a service you bolt on at the end, but instead a way of running a facility that assumes the people inside it are worth planning for. This ethos shows up in the cleaning schedule, the engineering response, the coffee quality and the conference room turnover. It’s more about the cost of attention over money.

It's how a workplace earns the right to bring people together to collaborate and build the relationships that carry their careers.

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