It’s the first time I’ve been to India and, in many ways, it was what I had expected but it also held some surprising revelations for me.
I had been warned about what to expect in terms of the bureaucracy and inbuilt hierarchical systems. I saw the Indian ‘job creation scheme’ in full swing, starting at the airport.
I mean, there was a man who held the door open for all the passengers disembarking the plane. Then there were several people dotted along a well-signposted route to passport control.
Once there, there were several people managing the formation and flow of the queue. Someone stood at the front of each booth and told you when to step forward. There was someone who looked at your passport then a man who looked at it again, someone who stamped it then a man who checked your visa and gave it to someone else with a stamp.
There was a man waiting to direct you to your taxi then a man who carried your luggage to the taxi then the man who drove the taxi and so it continued in the hotel, the shops… everywhere.
It seemed lots of people were assigned to some small menial tasks that seemed to be their one and only career focus.
Same issues as in UK
I was very surprised on our second night after a lovely meal in a wonderful family-run restaurant to speak to the owner and discover that he is in crisis. Apparently, the same old issues that we seem to be suffering from in hospitality in the UK are replicated and repeated in Goa.
This lovely man with impeccable manners who showed us amazing hospitality was at his wits’ end because he couldn’t get anyone to work for him.
“The youth of today don’t want to work”, he said. “At least not in hospitality.” Any workers he could get had a terrible attitude, didn’t want to learn, were offended if they were told how to do something and didn’t care about customers’ happiness or service standards.
When he could get staff, they would leave at a moment’s notice or demand certain days off with the threat that if they didn’t get the leave, they would quit. Chefs, if you could get one, moved around business to business demanding ever-increasing wages.
This family business, which had been successfully run by his parents for more than 25 years, was in danger of going under because the family were frustrated and exhausted.
Does this sound familiar to anyone? It certainly sounds familiar to me and I’m sure it would to the bar owner in Prague, Czech Republic, whom I spoke to in January who told me almost the same thing about his business.
So, the big question is why have we created a worldwide community of young people who are rejecting the desire to work and serve in hospitality?
The concept of ‘to serve’
It might be the word ‘serve’ or even the concept that seems to put people off. To serve someone is not to be in servitude but today’s society seem to find it difficult to distinguish and therefore rejects both. It might be that the customers we serve also find it difficult to distinguish.
I love my job. I tell my staff continually I am here to serve my customers but I am not a servant. To serve someone well brings great joy and satisfaction.
Last weekend, it was my greatest pleasure to roll up my sleeves and serve all the wonderful and deserving mothers who came through my door as a treat for Mother’s Day.
It was great to be able to talk to people and bring them good food and drink, and to facilitate making happy memories for their family. It was hard work and, by the end of the day, I was exhausted but as I sat down that night I remembered all the smiles and laughs and “thank yous” that had been part of my day.
Today’s youth don’t seem to be able to get that. They sit on their computers looking at the fake lives of influencers who project falsehoods onto their computer and phone screens. (Yes, they have influencers in Goa too. We met some of them.)
So maybe we need a few influencers in hospitality who can we share and project the joy of a job done well onto our computer screens for the youth of today to aspire to and to want to emulate.
Can we share the fun and laughs that come along the way and sell this as a job worth doing? I certainly hope so, something needs to be done before it’s too late or we are all too old.
