I keep hearing versions of the same story from people I know in hospitality and I keep seeing it pop up in different forms online too, people who’ve never spoken to each other describing what’s clearly the same problem without quite putting a name to it.
I used to know every guest by name within a day or two of them checking in. I never set out to do it, it just happens naturally when your head’s clear enough to notice things like that. What I see more often now is a GM who genuinely cares, still wants that kind of connection with guests and staff but spends half their shift jumping between systems just to sort out who’s actually rostered on Thursday. By the time someone on the floor actually needs them properly, there’s nothing left to give when you factor in all the other admin work that needed doing on top of dealing with the day to day.
This isn’t only a big hospitality property problem. An owner-operator running a small site solo is usually carrying more of it, not less. Books, rostering, half the marketing and all while still expected to be the steady presence their handful of staff can lean on when a guest’s kicked off or a shift’s fallen apart. There’s no admin layer to absorb any of that for a smaller operation. If anything the whole thing lands harder because there’s simply nobody else to pass it to.
I recently saw that there is healthcare research on this which is what prompted me to write a hospitality related article. Decision fatigue specifically, studies on nurses and doctors show that grinding through decision after decision doesn’t just slow people down, it actually reduces their empathy, in an industry where it matters most. Obviously not through choice but the brain seems to treat patience like a resource that runs dry and once it’s gone for the day, whatever’s left has to run on nothing.
That evidence comes from hospitals, not hotels and as far as I know nobody’s tested the equivalent on a hospitality floor. I’ll say clearly that’s a leap on my part, not a proven fact but watch a duty manager or floor manager try to genuinely coach someone twenty minutes after fighting with a PMS that won’t sync properly and the pattern doesn’t need a citation to be obvious.
Where the load is actually coming from
I’ve worked inside properties running half a dozen or more disconnected systems just to function day to day, so this isn’t theoretical for me. Separate tools for bookings, rostering, reviews, the Whatsapp, and or, Slack group chat nobody can escape, plus whatever got added last year and never got removed again. Someone has to hold all that together manually and it’s rarely the owner, it’s the GM. Part of why nobody fixes it is contractual, a lot of this software locks properties in for a year or more, so ripping it out mid-term is genuinely painful. Living with the mess ends up being the path of least resistance even for owners who’d sort it out if switching weren’t so costly and although I can understand this from a GM perspective, I cannot help but feel that the term, ignorance is bliss, is more prominent than ever.
Once that admin has eaten the day, there’s not much left of a manager by mid-afternoon and the team notices even if they couldn’t explain why. A conversation that used to run five minutes now runs two. Patience that would’ve stretched further doesn’t. None of that turns up on a P&L, but it shows up eventually in how the team feels about their job and their manager and in how the guest experiences whoever’s actually serving them.
I already know the counter-argument here, admin’s always existed, this isn’t new, people just need better organisation or thicker skin. I don’t buy that and I’ve been senior in this industry for close to 20 years now. What’s changed isn’t the existence of admin, it’s the shape of it. 15 years ago a duty manager was squaring off a till and updating a paper diary. Today it’s a PMS, a separate channel manager, a review platform, a rostering system and a WhatsApp thread that never sleeps, mostly none of it connected. The assumption that a manager only needs a couple of hours a week to keep on top of admin only makes sense if every day ran the same but as we know, they don’t. Someone calls in sick, a guest’s unhappy, the dishwasher dies, a delivery’s short and the paperwork still has to get done around all of it.
So what actually helps
I won’t pretend there’s one clean answer here because there isn’t, trust me I have contemplated it, but a handful of things have made a real difference where I’ve seen them tried personally and they work better when they go after the cause rather than papering over it.
Tech consolidation is usually the first thing people reach for and often the place they get it wrong. The instinct is to buy something new, another dashboard promising to bring everything under one roof. Sometimes it delivers but more often than not it just adds another login on top of the existing pile, because the old tools rarely get switched off, they just sit there alongside the new one. I’ve seen a property add a shiny reporting tool on top of an existing PMS and channel manager and six months on the manager had four screens to check instead of three, because nobody bothered retiring the old software once the new one turned up, or another common reasoning I have personally heard is, this one works fine (the old software) which is usually said by the owner who is rarely onsite and who doesn’t have to use it everyday.
One thing I started to do personally and it costs nothing, is guarding the manager’s time with people as fixed, not whatever survives after the paperwork’s done. Rosters are built to protect coverage on the floor but almost none protect the manager’s own ability to actually be present on it. Admin will always expand into whatever gap it’s given, so the only real defence is ring-fencing part of the day where “can this wait” defaults to yes. I’ve watched this work as simply as making the first hour of a shift admin-free, floor only, phone silenced unless it’s genuinely urgent. It’s not always realistic given how this industry runs, fair enough, but in properties where I have managed it, the gap in patience left by mid-afternoon is noticeably different.
There’s something a manager can do on their own too, separate from anything structural. Knowing your own rhythm, sharp early, running thin by late afternoon, means choosing when to have the conversations that actually need presence. Handle the tricky guest complaint or the coaching chat earlier in the shift if you can and leave the spreadsheet work for when there’s less emotional weight attached to getting it right. It doesn’t touch the underlying workload, but it’s a form of triage any manager could start using tomorrow without needing anyone else’s permission.
Worth returning to the healthcare research for a moment because there’s a genuinely useful detail in it. Decision fatigue is described as reversible and situational, not a fixed trait and not the same thing as a slow burnout spiral. Decision fatigue, by that same research, can recover within a single shift if the load genuinely lets up for a while. So a proper break, five minutes actually away from a screen rather than five minutes spent replying to messages, might do more than most people give it credit for. Worth trying personally before assuming the only answer is hiring more people.
The cheapest and personally one of the most appreciated solutions is the one that costs nothing but a conversation. Most owners genuinely couldn’t tell you how many hours a week their manager loses to reconciling systems versus actually being present with the team, because it’s never been measured. You don’t need a formal audit, just ask because you genuinely care about your managers and your team. The answer might not be comfortable but lets be honest, you can’t fix a cost you’ve never bothered pricing.
None of this is an argument for asking less of guest-facing teams or letting standards slip if anything it’s the opposite case. Holding a standard consistently through a shift requires the person responsible for it to still have something left by mid-afternoon, not just first thing when nothing’s gone wrong yet. Whether hospitality business owners are prepared to protect that on purpose is really the question underneath all of this.
We already know what happens when an industry lets this kind of pressure sit unaddressed long enough, it’s the whole reason organisations like the Burnt Chef Project exist for chefs. I don’t see why managers would turn out any different.
Even if it’s a bit of a stretch to claim, hospitality management might now be the hardest, most demanding role in this industry and it’s only got harder over the last decade. I’d like to see more owners build that into how they support the managers they’ve got and how they think about hiring for the role next time round.
