Your Hospitality Manager's Empathy Is Being Rationed by Their Inbox

I'm hoping many general managers will be able to relate to this article as recently, after talking to friends in the same field and industry and also seeing some reels on Instagram, I cannot help feel this topic is not one often written about and is also not just solely faced by the hospitality industry.

I used to know every guest's name by their second day, I wasn't trying to, it just happens when you've got the headspace for it. Hospitality GMs, such as myself, who genuinely care about their team burn half a shift bouncing between three or four systems just to work out who's rostered on Thursday and by the time a stressed member of staff actually needs them there's not much left and brain fog creeps in.

It's not just GMs at bigger properties either I do not think. If I talked to an owner-operator running a 12 bed place on their own I imagine I'll hear the same thing in different words. They're doing the books, the rostering, half the marketing and somehow still meant to be the calm, present person their staff can come to when a guest's been difficult or a shift's gone badly. Nobody scales that down for smaller teams and if anything it's worse, because there's no one else to hand any of it to.

I have seen research out of healthcare on this, on decision fatigue specifically. Nurses and doctors grinding through decision after decision end up cognitively worn down and it's not just slower reactions, their capacity for empathy actually drops in a sector where it matters most. Not because they stop caring but the brain seems to treat patience as a resource with a ceiling and once it's spent, whatever's left of the day runs on fumes (or so I imagine from my own personal experience).

Plenty of hospitality properties are running half a dozen disconnected platforms just to function, I have worked in these properties personally so I know first hand. One for bookings, one for rostering, one for reviews and that one someone bolted on last year and never got rid of. Somebody's stitching that together by hand and it's rarely the owner. It's the GM or the past one, or the one before them and as these tech usually come with 12 month contracts or longer, it is easier to follow the ignorance is bliss narrative.

The person whose attention is getting eaten by login screens is usually the same person the team looks to when things go sideways. By the time you have done your admin you have nothing left by 3pm and the team feels it even if nobody could tell you why, a shorter conversation here, a bit less patience there. It doesn't show up on a P&L but it shows up eventually in how the team feels about the job, the manager and in how the guest experiences the team.

We spend a lot of energy on staff burnout, rightly so, but almost none on what happens when the person meant to be catching that burnout is running on empty themselves.

I can already hear the pushback on some of this, managers have always had admin the argument goes, this isn't new, managers just need to be more resilient or better organised. I don't personally buy it after being in this industry and senior position for close to 20 years now, mostly because the volume of it has changed shape faster than the resilience training has. A duty manager fifteen years ago was reconciling a till and a paper diary, now we're logging into a PMS, a separate channel manager, a review platform, a rostering tool and a Whatsapp group chat that never stops usually with none of those systems talking to each other. It's a different job wearing the old title, not the same one with more paperwork bolted on.

So what do you actually do about it

In all honesty, I don't think there's one clean fix for this and I'm not going to pretend there is but there are a few things that I have done to help lessen the load and it always starts with focusing on the root of the issue, not applying a band aid.

Start with the tech stack, since that's usually the first place people look and the place they most often get it wrong. The instinct a lot of owners and managers have is to buy their way out of it, another piece of software, a dashboard that promises to pull everything into one view. Sometimes that genuinely helps but more often than not it just adds a new login on top of the old ones, because the old systems don't get switched off, they get supplemented.

I've watched a property add a shiny new reporting tool on top of an existing PMS and channel manager and six months later I was checking four screens instead of three, because my predecessor actually turned the old habits off once the new tool arrived. If you're going to spend money on this the question worth asking isn't what to add, it's what you can actually get rid of because consolidation only works if something disappears at the end of it.

The thing I'd actually prioritise over new software, though and it costs nothing, is treating a manager's people-time as a fixed commitment rather than whatever's left after the admin's done. Most rosters protect coverage on the floor but none protect a manager's own capacity to be present on that floor. Admin expands to fill whatever time isn't already spoken for, it always does, so the only way to stop it eating everything is to ring-fence a block of the day where the default answer to "can this wait" is yes. I've seen this work as something as simple as the first hour of a shift being genuinely off-limits to admin, floor only, phone on do not disturb for anything that isn't urgent. Sounds small on paper and lets face it, it is not always practical in hospitality but the difference by mid-afternoon in how much patience is actually left isn't small at all.

There's an individual side to it too, separate from anything an owner restructures. A manager who knows their own pattern, sharp at 9am, running on fumes by 4pm as an example can choose when to have the harder conversations. Save the coaching chat or the tricky guest complaint for the morning where possible, push the spreadsheet reconciliation to the afternoon when there's less emotional weight riding on getting it right. It's not a fix for the underlying load of course but knowing when your own tank's running low is a form of triage any manager can start applying tomorrow without waiting on anyone else to change anything.

The healthcare research I talked about earlier is worth one more mention, not just because it got me to thinking about this article but because it points somewhere useful. Decision fatigue gets described as a reversible, situational state, not a fixed trait or a slow slide into burnout, which matters because it's a genuinely different problem to solve. Burnout needs structural change, time off, sometimes maybe a different job. Decision fatigue, going by that research, can recover within a shift if the load actually eases off for a bit. So a short, deliberate break, five minutes away from a screen, an actual break rather than one spent answering messages, might do more than people assume. Worth trying before assuming the only answer is more staff in my opinion.

The one that is harder to solve and I won't pretend otherwise given how tight most margins are right now, is getting the admin reconciliation off the manager's plate entirely, onto someone whose job that actually is. Most properties can't afford to hire for that right now. It's still worth naming as the real structural fix, because the alternative, telling a manager to just manage their time better, puts the responsibility in the wrong place. Nobody's failing at time management here (assuming of course you are able to effectively handle and protect your time as a manager in hospitality). The job itself has quietly changed shape and nobody's redesigned it to match.

None of the above costs anything to start with and the last one costs nothing either. Most owners genuinely don't know how many hours a week their manager spends reconciling systems versus being present with the team because nobody's ever measured it. You don't need a formal audit for that, just a proper conversation. You might not like the answer but you can't fix a cost you've never priced. Another common thought is that a manager should only need a couple of hours a week to do their paperwork, and in most cases this is largely not true. This may apply if every day was always the same, but as we know, in hospitality it never is, staff call sick, guest complains, dishwasher breaks, delivery arrives and so on and so on.

I know all of this lands at a time when a lot of owners are already squeezed on every side, wages up, margins thinner, not much room to hire someone new to take admin off a manager's plate. That's real and I'm not going to pretend it isn't but a manager who's running on empty by mid-shift isn't a cheaper version of a well-supported one, they're just a hidden cost that hasn't been priced yet, showing up later as a resignation, a bad review, or a member of staff who quietly checks out. Some of what I've listed above costs nothing but attention and the bits that do cost something are still worth weighing against what the current setup is already costing, just less visibly.

None of this is about doing less for guests or lowering standards, it's closer to the opposite. If you want the standard held consistently, the person holding it needs enough left by 3pm to actually do it, not just at 9am before anything's gone wrong. Whether that's worth protecting on purpose is really the whole question here and owners should be spending more time with their managers and ensuring they have everything they need to do their jobs well because ultimately, and maybe controversially, I firmly believe being a manager in hospitality is now the single hardest and demanding job there is at a time where it has only got worse when compared to 10 years ago.

I hope owners take this seriously, both for the managers they've got and the ones they're about to hire. We already know what happens when an industry ignores this for long enough, it's why the Burnt Chef Project exists for chefs. I don't see any reason managers would be the exception.