Interactive dashboard: New Work practices

The starting point: Lots of recommendations, little guidance

Flexible rotas, wellbeing programmes, digital tools, new leadership models: anyone exploring the topic of New Work in the hospitality industry today is quickly overwhelmed by a deluge of recommendations. The problem: most of them are offered without context. What works brilliantly in a large Scandinavian hotel with strong employee participation structures is neither feasible nor sensible in a family-run hotel in the Black Forest, and vice versa.

Yet the challenges are the same across the industry: staff turnover at a level that costs businesses a significant proportion of their experienced staff each year. Vacancies that remain unfilled for months on end. Applicants who drop out even before the interview has taken place. And a market where skilled workers can now choose their employers, not the other way around.

What is missing is not yet another guidebook. What is missing is comparability: who does what, and what measurable difference does it make?

What a dashboard can and cannot do

An interactive dashboard is not a silver bullet, nor is it an additional bureaucratic project. It is a tool that makes visible what has hitherto remained shrouded in mystery.

The key difference from a static report or a PowerPoint analysis is that users can actively work with the data. They can filter (e.g., by country, business size, segment), adjust time periods, view individual metrics and compare different businesses with one another – in real time, at a glance.

What a well-designed new-work dashboard for the hospitality industry should be able to do:

• Capture New Work building blocks in a structured manner: flex-time models, self-service rostering, wellbeing and mental health initiatives, learning formats, participation models, digital communication tools.
• Enable comparisons between countries, market segments and business types – chain vs independent, resort vs city hotel, business vs leisure.
• Make relevant metrics visible: turnover rate, time to hire, cost of vacancy, sickness rate, employee satisfaction, engagement scores and their (respective) correlation with the measures implemented.

What it doesn't do: It doesn't replace entrepreneurial judgement. It does not provide ready-made answers. However, it does highlight the right questions, backed up by figures.

Three specific real-world examples

Example 1: The chain that didn't know why one property was performing better than all the others

A medium-sized hotel chain with twelve properties in four countries notices that its staff turnover rate varies considerably: between 18% and 61% per year. The management's gut feeling: the different labour markets are to blame.

However, a data-driven analysis reveals that the country is not the decisive factor. The strongest predictor is a single feature: self-service shift scheduling. The hotel where staff can independently swap and request shifts via an app consistently has a turnover rate of less than 25%. Almost all of the hotels without this tool have a turnover rate of over 40%.

Impact: Rollout of the tool to all locations: Within 18 months, the average staff turnover rate falls by 14 percentage points. Cost savings from reduced recruitment and induction costs alone: in the six-figure range per year. This sum is out of all proportion to the cost of implementing the software or app and providing training on how to use it. 

Example 2: The boutique hotel that has finally realised what makes it stand out

An owner-managed 4-star hotel with 45 rooms in southern Germany has for years been struggling with the belief that it is fundamentally at a disadvantage compared to larger establishments and chains – no on-site nursery, no gym, no structured development programme.

A look at comparable establishments shows that what staff in similar owner-managed hotels actually value are not expensive benefits. It is recognition, reliability in the rota and concrete development prospects, even without a formal career ladder. Establishments that combine monthly, or at least closely spaced, regular one-to-one meetings with clear feedback and at least one training opportunity per quarter have a retention rate that is 18–22% above the industry average.

Impact: The hotel introduces structured quarterly check-ins and facilitates targeted cross-training between departments. After one year: staff turnover halved, two external applications following recommendations from existing staff.

Example 3: The international brand that thinks globally but fails locally

An international hotel group develops a global ‘New Work’ framework at group level, featuring uniform wellbeing standards, digital onboarding and a learning platform. The rollout is scheduled to take place simultaneously in 18 countries.

What the dashboard reveals: In Southern Europe, mental health services are scarcely used. This is not due to a lack of need, but rather to culturally rooted scepticism towards openly discussed health issues in the workplace. In Scandinavia, digital onboarding modules are already standard practice and are perceived as hardly innovative. In Eastern Europe, there is simply a lack of stable digital infrastructure.

Without this differentiation, the same programme in all three contexts would be either ineffective, demotivating or even counterproductive.

Impact: Country-specific adaptation of the framework with regional roll-out schedules. Result: Programme adoption rate rises from 31% to 74% within two years.

What such a dashboard requires

The quality of a dashboard stands or falls on the quality of its data foundation. Various sources are suitable for a New Work dashboard in the hospitality sector:

• International hospitality studies (e.g. Deloitte Hospitality Reports, McKinsey workforce analyses, AHLA industry surveys)
• Workforce reports and HR benchmarking data from national industry associations (DEHOGA, Hotrec, etc.)
• Anonymised operational data – the most valuable component in the long term, which can be built up gradually as participation grows
• HR best-practice analyses from consultancy projects and academic publications
• In-house surveys and questionnaires

Even a dashboard that is initially based solely on published studies and benchmarks represents a significant gain in insight compared to the status quo: intuitive gut feeling without any point of reference.

Why this is also relevant for owner-managed businesses

At this point, a common misconception needs to be addressed: a dashboard of this kind is not a tool for large corporations with their own HR departments and data analytics teams. If done correctly, it is particularly beneficial for small and medium-sized businesses.

Because what the owner of a thirty-room hotel has not had until now is a point of comparison. The question “Do we have a noticeably high staff turnover?” could previously only be answered based on gut feeling. With a dashboard, this question can be answered at a glance and, more importantly, the follow-up question can be asked: “What are similar businesses doing that are performing better?”

The managing director of an owner-managed hotel recently said: “That’s all business school stuff.” This is both understandable and wrong. Because the alternatives are more expensive: vacancies that remain unfilled for months. Recurring training costs. Guests who notice the difference. A dashboard makes this connection visible, without consultants, without data specialists, without overheads.

What becomes apparent and what it means

An interactive New Work dashboard transforms isolated individual observations into a strategic roadmap. It answers questions that previously could not be answered:

• Which measures have been proven to reduce staff turnover in my segment and in my region?
• How do I compare with similar organisations in terms of satisfaction, time to fill vacancies and sickness absence rates?
• Which investment offers the greatest leverage: a new learning platform, a wellbeing budget or an improved rota process?
• Which best practices from other markets are transferable to my context and which are definitely not?

New Work is not an end in itself. It is a response to a market that has changed. The question is no longer whether one needs to address it, but how to do so in a way that actually works.

A dashboard helps to find out exactly that.