The Black Rabbitt

The hospitality industry has definitely seen its share of abuse over the years. Physical and mental, along with substance abuse has poisoned the industry. While pay inequality, depression, unhappiness and mistreatment of its labor force has become common practice across the world. Fostering the answer of “this is how things are done” within our walls needs to stop. Things can change and things need to change. The only way forward is to fix a broken system, and adapt the changes that can enable our workforce to thrive and once again think of hospitality as a career and not just a blip in the road of one’s career.

Over the past few years, many conversations have been had on how to change the hierarchical manners of running a restaurant. How can one lead from the top while inspiring its team to follow in the proper manner? Our answer within our companies internal processes is “Trying and failing with an intentful process is the only road to success”. With every mishap comes an opportunity to learn, grow, and succeed. This takes courage, it takes trust and the mental capacity and willingness to learn from those around us.

After we adopted this mentality everything got clearer. We needed to adopt more change to ensure that we could nurture our team for growth. Not just use them as the cheapest labour possible to discard them when mistakes happen. We decided to make bold moves to grow. We put everyone on a salary that reflected a living wage in our part of the world, created systems to take rest, and made everyone accountable for their work.

Creating experiences and working with the public is hard. It consists of constant improvements as we move forward and we get feedback instantaneously. To ensure that we are mentally ready for our clients, we decided to make rest mandatory. We provide two days off a week and five weeks paid vacation for all employees every year. We also provide gym memberships, team meals before service and are advocates for anything health related to ensure that our teams physical and mental health is at its best.

Leading with respect is at the core of our philosophy, respect from the top down and every which way that we lead. We give time to discuss issues, have an open conversation about our weeks and what we can improve upon. This is a constant evaluation of how we are doing and we make sure as a team that we are all accountable for the health of our team and the health of our company.

Making sure we have time to focus is at the top most of our priorities. Systems have been developed alongside rigorous scheduling techniques to ensure that we not only have the time to create and deliver our products, but also to ensure that we are mentally capable of operating with full focus and commitment to our clients.

The only way forward is to change. Change the way we manage our businesses, the way we operate financially and begin the journey of telling our clients that in order to do so they will need to treat our team with respect and accept how and what we charge for our products. With the rise of the cost of goods and living expenses on the rise, we need to ensure that the health of our companies and our teams are treated in an equal manner.

As owners and managers, we have the responsibility and duty to make the hard choices so that our industry can flourish. We can do so without the burden of all the poisonous rituals that have been normalized within our industry. Paying living wages and operating with respect is possible. It takes hard work and dedication to make sure that we can work together to achieve success. Change is hard at the start, messy in the middle, and beautiful at the end.