It has a lot to do with us as employers, leaders, and managers who are in the hiring seat. It's so important to develop that employee experience and compassion so that you can build your talent pool and hire the right people.
It has a lot to do with us as employers, leaders, and managers who are in the hiring seat. It's so important to develop that employee experience and compassion so that you can build your talent pool and hire the right people.
Hotels and restaurants are adding digital tools across the front desk, housekeeping, and the kitchen, where comfort with a computer varies widely from one worker to the next. Many operators fund the tools and the systems that support them, while the training to go with them often depends on whatever time a manager can find. Some employees who find a new system difficult work around it on their own or eventually leave. Keeping those employees often comes down to individualized support during the rollout, and to a manager who notices before a worker gives up on a new tool.
Michelle Karamitsios is Founder of Your Work Voice, an HR consulting practice that advises employers on hiring and retention and employees on their own workplace concerns. She's spent more than 27 years in human resources, with most of her career in hospitality and food and beverage. Karamitsios previously served as Human Resources Director at Hilton Sandestin Beach Golf Resort and Spa and at the World Equestrian Center. Earlier at Marriott International, she held roles spanning associate experience, global operations, and market-level HR leadership. Karamitsios now works with both organizations and individual workers, giving her an honest look at both sides of the workplace.
"Maybe I've worked for the same company and they've invested in putting all these AI tools into place and training, but I'm onboarding a new person who's not that familiar with them. It has a lot to do with us as employers, leaders, and managers who are in the hiring seat. It's so important to develop that employee experience and compassion so that you can build your talent pool and hire the right people," says Karamitsios. Administrative work across hospitality back offices has become faster with AI, and in her experience, the workers whose job requirements change first are spread across roles and career stages. She expects unfilled jobs and unplaced workers to appear together.
A course library worth sharing
Employers who buy new tools still have to build the systems around them, and Karamitsios finds the teaching is where that spending tends to fall short. Hospitality managers have little room in a day for instruction, and capacity is the constraint she names most often. "If we have generations and generations of individuals that are still working, they are not computer savvy, and most employers aren't willing to, or have the time or resources to teach individuals how to work in what's coming in this new world," she notes.
Free training already exists for the workers who need it. Karamitsios spent years partnering with Florida's state career centers where online course libraries teach basic computer skills and AI, and some courses carry certifications. Public funding covers them and she says the access reaches past the local area. "They have developed an amazing training tool that's available to anybody and everybody," she explains. "You don't have to live in the county that offers it."
Awareness is another barrier Karamitsios names, and she places the outreach work on employers and workforce organizations. From her perspective, employers in security-focused industries have moved on this early, since they can see which roles AI will reach first. A manager who knows the course library exists can hand it to an employee whose job is changing. "Getting the word out that this is available and there's no charge for it is the key, and I think that's where many struggle," she adds.
Support at the rollout
Karamitsios watched hotels move their employee surveys from paper to a computer. The old form may have asked a worker to fill in circles with a pencil, but answering the same questions now required some comfort with a keyboard. "The biggest group that was impacted was our non-English speaking housekeepers," she recalls. "English was not their first language. Some of our lower level culinary workers struggled with that too."
BambooHR's Redesigning Work: AI's Performance Review found that 76% of HR professionals describe themselves as confident, everyday AI users, while half of employees say the same. In that same research, 63% of organizations increased their AI tool budgets in response to how employees were already using them. Employees in the same report spend 42% of their time with AI on troubleshooting and prompt iteration, or roughly 20 workdays a year.
Karamitsios asks managers to work through a new system with one employee at a time, sitting with the housekeeper who struggled with the survey until she can get through it on her own. She finds this step gets skipped in organizations that treat the role as an easy one to refill. "Not everyone is going to be as savvy as the next person," she says. "As employers and leaders, it's about taking that time to do a little bit more training or spending a little bit more one-on-one time so that those employees don't leave."
Loyalty earned on day one
Busy hospitality managers rarely set out to treat a team badly on purpose, and Karamitsios attributes insensitivity to the hundreds of tasks in a manager's day. Frontline supervisors who are able to handle a hard conversation well often give an employee a reason to stay. "The reason why people leave hasn't changed over the last decade," she says. "They leave because of their immediate manager and supervisor and the way they're treated. It's not because they pay a dollar more across the street."
At the hotels where Karamitsios ran HR, she wrote the standard for employee treatment herself. She watched other properties let that standard slip and end up with open roles and few applicants. A property's reputation for how it handles its staff can spread, reaching the candidates it most needs to hire. "If you can deliver a hospitable experience equivalent to the way we want our guests to be treated, from the application all the way until a person's last day, then there will be no issues with those employees delivering that exceptional service to the guests," she explains.
Karamitsios sees incivility on the rise between coworkers, both in her consulting work and in online groups where restaurant and hotel staff talk. An employee who is rude to a colleague today may need that colleague’s help tomorrow, and a supervisor who discovers the issue early can settle it quickly. She wants supervisors handling these incidents before that first incident becomes a case that needs a more formal conversation. "I think listening is so important," she concludes. "For leaders, it's really just about genuinely taking care of your people."
