CODE Happiness in Hospitality 2022: Hawksmoor co-founder Will Beckett on the perks of being in hospitality

This week, we launch our annual Happiness in Hospitality report. Our fourth report asks one simple question: why do you work in hospitality? Here, Hawksmoor co-founder Will Beckett provides a foreword.

I’d say that roughly half of the people I know in hospitality ended up here by accident; the other half had a sense of what they wanted. What keeps us all here is ultimately about making people happy. It is the great privilege of hospitality, and the main reason why the old-fashioned view that ‘service’ is beneath so many people feels out of date.

The author Shawn Achor wrote a book called ‘The Happiness Advantage’. In it, he talks about ‘the Tetris effect’. For those of you not old enough to remember, Tetris was an addictive game where you create neat, rectangular blocks out of different geometric shapes … play often enough and you start seeing opportunities to drop those shapes into real life. That’s the Tetris effect.

Anchor writes that the Tetris effect exists in work. If you’re an accountant, you get into the habit of tallying things up, making them balance; if you’re a lawyer, you start looking for flaws in arguments; if you’re an editor you look for grammatical mistakes.

Imagine a work-life where you start developing an instinct for increasing other people’s happiness: that’s the Tetris effect of hospitality. It’s a big part of the reason the industry is so addictive to so many of us, and it makes hospitality stand out from almost any other job I can think of.

Hospitality’s main flaw, historically, was that it wasn’t very good at making its own people happy. Conditions could be hard, pay mediocre, and management and training limited. In some pockets of the industry, these flaws are still found.

The best hospitality businesses now follow a simple philosophy: keep the people who work with you happy and let them take care of making guests happy. That has seen working conditions improve, pay rates increase and things like benefits, training and development rise across all kinds of venues.

There’s still room for improvement. We have more work to do on mental and physical health and must all acknowledge the industry hasn’t always done as much as it should in terms of diversity, equality and inclusion. We need an industry that has genuine equality of opportunity (for pay, development, promotions and, yes … happiness) for all.

Hospitality has had a rough ride over recent years, but if we can keep focused on the main thing – businesses keeping their teams happy, teams keeping their guests happy, then that is the foundation for everything else. Happiness in hospitality is, quite literally, the most important thing there is.

Happiness in Hospitality 2022 is available exclusively to CODE members via the CODE app

Don’t work in hospitality? Get in touch with our team