Yes, in sequence. The guest experience is produced by the team, so the hoteliers and chefs I interviewed invest in their people first and treat the guest result as the consequence. The building, the linens and the location create conditions; only the staff can turn those conditions into loyalty.
The question assumes a competition that the best operators do not recognize. In their hands, the employee experience and the guest experience are the same project at two different stages. The team comes first because the team is what produces everything the guest will feel. Most operators reverse the order, and that reversal is the most common cause of mediocrity in either field.
Tom Roelens, then general manager of Four Seasons Resort Lanaʻi in Hawaii, made the case from the guest’s side of the equation.
“You can have the most amazing physical asset in a beautiful natural surrounding and in an idyllic location. But it all comes down to people and the service they provide. That’s what makes the difference between whether or not guests decide to come back.” Tom Roelens, then general manager, Four Seasons Resort Lanaʻi
The asset does not produce loyalty. The team does. The asset produces the conditions under which the team can produce loyalty, which is a different and more modest role than most capital budgets assume. On the restaurant side, Joan Roca of El Celler de Can Roca told me that cooking is a team sport and that human capital is the most important capital in the restaurant. He grew his kitchen from two cooks to forty while twice reaching the top of the World’s 50 Best list, and the arithmetic of that growth only works if the team is understood as the product rather than a resource the chef spends to make the product.
The story that anchors the chapter shows what putting the employee first looks like in practice. In the late 1980s a young hotelier in Europe had been working too many shifts in a row. His manager could see what he could not: that one more double would push him into fatigue that would not recover quickly, and that the department needed him at his best in three days for an arrival he did not know about. The manager took him to lunch, sent him home and finished the shift himself. The young man walked home convinced he had done something wrong. He came back rested, was asked how he felt, said better, and the covered shift was never mentioned again. That young man was Aaron Kaupp. He is now in his sixties, running luxury hotels at a level few in either field will reach, and he still tells the story. The manager spent an afternoon of attention on a junior colleague. The return has been compounding for nearly forty years, inside Kaupp’s career and inside the careers of everyone he has led since.
Nicolai Nørregaard of Kadeau in Copenhagen describes the same priority as an operating rule rather than a sentiment.
“We’ve always viewed our staff as family, and work hard to create an environment where our employees feel comfortable and secure. It’s vital that staff love their work.” Nicolai Nørregaard, Kadeau, Copenhagen
Nørregaard treats the team’s emotional security as operationally necessary. Shouting and bullying are prohibited in his kitchen on the same plane as a sanitation standard. Every summer he closes Kadeau Copenhagen and moves the whole staff to a farmhouse on Bornholm to work the high season together. A team that has lived and cooked together for three months delivers a kind of service no training module can produce. The guests on Bornholm and in Copenhagen are the beneficiaries of a decision that was made, first, about the staff.
The investments involved, from a two day onboarding to a general manager attending every new recruit’s orientation to the financial transparency that shares the property’s results with the people who deliver them, look on a quarterly statement like discretionary expense. The leaders in this book treat them as capital expenditure on the only durable asset the industry produces. A competitor can copy the suite mix and the spa within eighteen months. It cannot copy a team that has been taken care of for a decade. Putting the employee first is how the guest ends up first.
Chapter 4, First the Team, follows this conviction through hiring, onboarding, culture, the leader’s role as protector, and the economics of a team built over years.