New Work in the hospitality industry – best practice & a look to the future

New Work where the rota is posted

When people talk about New Work, many of them first think of tech start-ups, working from home and trendy offices. In the hotel and hospitality industry, the reality is often different: shift work, irregular working hours, a shortage of skilled staff and high guest pressure are part of everyday life. For years, studies have shown high staff turnover and recruitment problems in the sector – a situation exacerbated by the pandemic.

Precisely for this reason, New Work in the hospitality sector is not a 'nice-to-have' but a strategic lever: for employer attractiveness, employee retention and service quality. Modern HR practices, flexible working-time models, digital tools and a culture of participation are key building blocks of this development.

What New Work means in the hospitality industry

In the hotel and hospitality sector, New Work cannot simply be equated with 'working from home' or a 'trendy work environment' – after all, the majority of the work takes place in front of the guest. Therefore, meaningful New Work approaches focus primarily on the following areas:

• Making working hours and deployment models more flexible (e.g., preferred duty rosters, flex pools, job sharing).
• Greater employee participation and responsibility (empowerment, involvement in shaping processes, a culture of feedback).
• Digitalisation and automation of routine tasks to free up time for guests and for professional development.
• A focus on learning, development and career paths, including for operational roles.
• Health, safety and wellbeing as integral components of work organisation, reinforced by experiences during the pandemic.

New Work thus becomes a modular system from which hotels and hospitality businesses can combine the elements that suit them – depending on their size, concept and target groups.

Best practice 1: Flexible duty rosters and new staffing models

The industry is increasingly moving away from rigid duty rosters, which are only published on Sunday for the following week (although they should actually be communicated on Thursdays during normal business hours), towards more flexible models that take into account both operational workload and individual needs. These include:

• Shift-swap apps and self-service tools that enable staff to request, swap or take on additional shifts.
• Flexible staff deployment across a property's various outlets (e.g. breakfast, bar, events) through cross-training.
• Part-time and seasonal models with more reliable scheduling to increase income security.

Flexible staffing models in hotels not only respond to volatile demand, but also increase staff satisfaction and reduce staff turnover because employees are given greater control over their working hours. In addition, a certain momentum usually develops within the team, which ensures that all those involved follow the rota planning processes and take sufficient account of company or operational requirements in the process. Even when planning errors occur and parts of the team or the team as a whole 'get their comeuppance', this has a positive effect: employees learn from these situations, become better at assessing their own skills, strengths and weaknesses, improve their communication, take on responsibility, and thereby develop optimal shift planning that takes into account guest types and the requirements of day-to-day business. 

Real-world example

• Several international hotel chains now rely on automated workforce management systems: these systems take into account forecasts, occupancy data and staff preferences, and generate rota schedules based on this information. 
• At the same time, staff are empowered through apps to swap shifts or book additional duties – an approach that promotes autonomy and reduces the workload associated with rostering.
• Even without any technology, this can also be achieved in small and medium-sized businesses by displaying a rota or providing a corresponding file covering several weeks (a four-week rota), ensuring clear and continuously updated communication on the forecast, and establishing a rotating responsibility (either by department or by individual) for drawing up and updating the rotas.

Best Practice 2: Digital tools for communication and collaboration

Digital platforms, intranet apps and collaboration tools are increasingly finding their way into hotels and tourism businesses. They serve to

• digitise routine tasks and information flows,
• improve communication between departments and shifts,
• and make knowledge and standards centrally available.

A white paper by hotelkit on ‘New Work in Tourism’ (Source: https://hotelkit.net/de/blog/das-new-work-hotel/, accessed on 21 April 2026 at 12:52 pm) shows that digital tools offer the opportunity to professionalise internal communication, break down silos and free up time for core guest-facing tasks.

Real-world example

hotelkit documents numerous hotels that manage checklists, handover procedures, repair requests, housekeeping tasks and SOPs via an app. This reduces paperwork, ensures transparency and enables responsibility to be delegated further down the line within teams.

Projects such as the Fraunhofer IAO’s “Next Work in the Business Ecosystem of the 360° Guest World” demonstrate how businesses are working together on digital and organisational innovations to make work in the “guest world” more attractive.

Best Practice 3: Employee-centred HR and learning concepts

Leading HR concepts in the hospitality sector are placing greater focus on employees’ needs in order to reduce staff turnover and boost engagement:

• Continuous training and upskilling, e.g. in digitalisation, guest experience, languages and leadership.
• Career paths beyond the traditional hierarchy – for example, towards guest experience, revenue management or training.
• Empowerment at the guest’s level: employees are given the freedom to make decisions so they can offer individual solutions and shape service experiences.

EHL Insights shows, for example, that hotels which give their employees creative freedom and development opportunities achieve measurably lower staff turnover rates and higher guest satisfaction. I myself once supervised a project on complaint management at the Hotel Management Academy in Koblenz as part of a further training programme, which, over a period of twelve months, gradually defined and granted such creative freedom. The outcome of the project was clear: staff utilised these new skills with care and consideration. The focus was on guest satisfaction and resolving the cause of the complaint. Often, a mindful, empathetic conversation with guests over a coffee or a beer was sufficient to restore guest satisfaction and secure positive reviews. Furthermore, a sense of responsibility grew within the team to find solutions for recurring complaints and present them to management. The costs of handling complaints were reduced by 72%! Managers, who previously operated solely within a strictly defined framework, often avoided direct contact with guests and, from the comfort of their office chairs, authorised the removal of certain services from the bill or a reduction in the room rate. In other words, instead of addressing the ‘sticking point’ for the guest in question, they remained in the comfort zone of their own office and resolved the matter through price reductions. As a result, certain mistakes kept recurring. They became routine rather than the subject of optimisation within the framework of quality management.

Practical examples

• Hotels that establish empowerment rules (e.g. ‘up to amount X, you can decide independently to resolve a guest issue’, actively delegating house rules to staff, project responsibility) and share success stories internally.
• Businesses that firmly integrate learning time into the rota – e.g. micro-learning units via an app, short training sessions before the start of a shift, or learning pathways for new roles.

Best Practice 4: Health, safety and wellbeing as the foundation of the new way of working

The pandemic has highlighted weaknesses in the industry’s workplace design: high stress levels, health risks and uncertainty. Research into the future of work in the hospitality sector emphasises:

• the importance of safe working conditions and clear health standards,
• the need for flexible working models to mitigate risks,
• and the significance of mental health and resilience programmes.

Aon plc notes that hotels have permanently embedded many of the safety and wellbeing measures introduced during the pandemic, thereby strengthening the trust of both guests and staff. In business and industry, mental health coaching and active exercise programmes during working hours – or at least in the workplace – have been part of employer benefits for some time.

Real-world example

• Hotels that introduce wellbeing programmes, such as access to counselling services, health checks, stress management training and financial resilience programmes.
• Establishments that review work organisation and workplace design (e.g. ergonomic workstations, break rooms, shift lengths) and actively address these issues in staff dialogue.

What is possible beyond best practice: The future of New Work in the hospitality industry

In addition to the existing examples, it is becoming clear where New Work in the hospitality industry could develop next.

1. Platform-based working models with social security

• The concept of ‘employee sharing’, whereby several employers share staff, is discussed in research as a flexible approach to responding to seasonal fluctuations and securing employment.
• In future, there could be: (more) regional platforms emerge (as initial implementations already exist) through which hotels, restaurants and event organisers ‘share’ staff – with uniform standards, further training and social security.
• Employees switch temporarily between establishments or even sectors without constantly changing employers formally (e.g. through collaborations within a ‘hospitality ecosystem’).

2. Hybrid roles and remote working where it makes sense
Whilst front-office and F&B roles remain physical, areas such as revenue management, reservations, marketing or HR can increasingly be organised on a hybrid or remote basis (this is not about outsourcing!).

Future scenarios envisage:

• Remote reservations teams managing multiple properties centrally,
• digital guest relations, e.g. via chat or video,
• decentralised back-office teams working from different locations.

This opens up new talent pools, improves work-life balance and makes the industry more attractive to skilled workers who do not wish to, or are unable to, work permanently on a shift system and/or on-site.

3. Participation models and genuine co-determination
New Work in the hospitality sector can also mean involving employees more closely in decisions and successes:

• Participation in concept development and service innovations (co-creation) with clear feedback,
• transparent key performance indicators and profit-sharing models,
• participation in sustainability projects and community activities at the establishments.

The Fraunhofer approach, ‘Next Work in the Business Ecosystem of the 360° Hospitality World’, emphasises that joint strategies within hospitality businesses can unlock enormous potential for innovation and attractiveness.

4. AI-supported assistance rather than additional control
AI and automation are more likely to be used in the hospitality industry to ease the workload, for example:

• for dynamic staff requirement planning (forecasting),
• for optimising workflows (e.g. housekeeping routing),
• for evaluating feedback and suggestions for improvement from employees.

It will be crucial to view AI as a support system that creates transparency and enables employee input, rather than increasing control and pressure.

Conclusion: New Work in the hospitality sector is a cultural project – with technology as an enabler

New Work in the hotel and restaurant industry does not mean forcing the sector into an office setting. It is about rethinking the specific conditions – shift work, a strong service focus, volatile demand – and finding contemporary solutions.

Best-practice examples show that flexible working time models, digital tools, employee-centred HR concepts and a culture of participation are already having measurable effects on satisfaction, loyalty and service quality.

The future of New Work in the hospitality industry lies where businesses experiment together with their teams: with new working and participation models, with regional partnerships, and with technology that supports people rather than replacing them.

Those who take this path will not only find it easier to attract skilled staff – but will also renew the industry’s promise: hospitality begins with the team.