The Conductor’s Choice: Hospitality vs Service in Employee Engagement

Imagine two orchestras. In the first, every musician shows up on time, their instruments tuned, each note played correctly. The conductor sticks to the score. It’s technically perfect.

In the second, the same score is played. But this time, the room is electric. The musicians aren’t just playing the notes; they’re feeling the music. There’s connection. Expression. Eye contact. A sense of shared purpose flows from the conductor through every player.

Both performances are correct. Only one is unforgettable. One delivers a performance. The other creates an experience.

This is the difference between service and hospitality. It’s not just for customers. It matters just as much for your employees.

We might be familiar with the phrase “Service is what you do; hospitality is how you make people feel” in the context of customers. It’s a helpful distinction that emphasises the emotional quality of an interaction, not just the technical execution. But what happens when we apply that same lens internally?

In leadership, it’s easy to focus on getting the notes right: the policies, the practices, the processes. But what makes culture sing is how people feel in the room. Not just that they showed up, but that they were invited in.

When it comes to employees, we often talk about engagement like a checklist: benefits, onboarding, 1:1s, team lunches. But engagement is not a transaction. It’s not a KPI you tick off. That’s the employee equivalent of service.

If we consider engagement as hospitality, it forces us to ask something deeper:

• Do people feel welcome here or just another cog?
• Do they feel seen or just managed?
• Do they feel like they belong or like they’re just passing through?

The answer to that question may have more to do with our behaviour as leaders than with any HR policy. And it might be the most underappreciated element of leadership today.

In a world obsessed with scaling process, the leaders who scale hospitality – empathy, presence, emotional attentiveness – will quietly build the most loyal, energised teams

At its best, service is the foundation: clear expectations, resources, and processes that help people do their work. Hospitality is the climate. It’s the tone in the room. It’s the difference between an employee saying “I work here” and “I love working here.” But the differences go further than this.

Service Can Be Anonymous. Hospitality Is Personal:

“Service gets the job done. Hospitality sees the human behind the job.”

Imagine you’ve been given a project to improve the onboarding experience for new starters. How would you begin?

It’s likely you’d naturally focus on service. Are their credentials set up with IT to allow access from day one? Is payroll confirmed and employee number created? Has a calendar invite been sent to their line manager to meet them at the start of their shift?

These are important questions. It’s no use a new employee starting without the right to work, or lacking IT access to do their role. But, at its best, this is efficient and transactional. It’s expected that the new hire can access the building and systems, and meet their manager. It’s service.

Now imagine this: The new hire is met at the door with a welcome card signed by their team. The manager remembered their coffee order from the interview and brought them the same vanilla latte. Nothing dramatic; just care made visible. Just hospitality.

This focus on empathy and personalisation – the experience for this specific individual – have been studied as far back as 1993 in customer contexts. Writing in a Harvard Business Review article, Treacy and Wiersema highlighted emotional connection as a source of strategic advantage, a principle that continues to inform how businesses tailor experiences to individual customer’s wants, needs and preferences today.

Hotel chain Four Seasons train their employees to recognise guest preferences and to systematically log them for future stays. It’s invisible personalisation, not just friendliness. Spotify: Wrapped is a less obvious tech example. By creating user-specific histories and recommended playlists based on prior listening habits, it creates emotional connection by making the user feel seen.

This is human-centred design thinking: a problem-solving approach that prioritises understanding and addressing human needs and experiences throughout the design process. It involves empathy for users and defining the problem from their perspective. In these examples, the human needs are customers. But it can also apply to employees.

Service Fixes Problems. Hospitality Anticipates Needs.

“Service wipes the table. Hospitality notices you’ve run out of napkins before you ask.”

In 2016, the UEFA European Football Championship (the Euros) was about to kick-off (pun intended) and I was working in a large telco organisation with multiple contact centres in the UK. England had not made it out of the group stages in the 2014 World Cup, and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland had failed to qualify. But 2016 was to be different. Each of the home nations had qualified and England’s performances had improved under new manager Gareth Southgate.

Operationally, this was recognised as a potential risk to the contact centres. How would IT restrict Internet access to streaming sites for matches, whilst still allowing access to sites needed to provide customer service? If the football teams were successful, how would we manage absenteeism and reductions in resource on the day or post-matches? If the contact centre wallboards showed live matches, would that help or hinder customer interactions?

The de facto focus was entirely on the customer impact. Little initial consideration was given to the employee wants, needs and preferences. But there was an opportunity to foster improved employer-employee relationships and build an emotional connection through anticipating those employee desires.

Recognising that contact demand would be reduced during matches and post-match customer queries would be focused on high-impact service requirements (i.e., complaints, issues that cannot wait) rather than outbound sales, we made the choice to close our offshore outbound channels and utilise those representatives to handle the inbound queries. This provided onshore availability for individuals that wanted to watch the home nation matches.

But there was more. Rather than simply providing offline time in the contact centres, we created an outdoor viewing area. A 50ft projection TV, hog roast, and a beanbag chair area were organised in the sunshine.

This proactive, hospitality-focused approach delivered several benefits to the organisation. Studies by Forrester and Deloitte have shown that anticipating needs increases these relational attributes, and increases trust in the brand (i.e., eNPS, engagement scores). Within these contact centres, satisfaction and trust in the employee community measurably increased, whilst absenteeism was unaffected.

Considering and anticipating human needs also creates goodwill that people want to return (Cialdini, 2001). When Diwali was celebrated in the India-based contact centres, UK-based employees were more comfortable in flexing their roles to allow for the same resource reduction for their operations.

This is why Apple train employees to approach customers in-store before they ask for help, creating a sense of attentiveness without pressure. It’s why Zappos help customers find competitors, if they don’t have what they need.

Service Is Paid For. Hospitality Is Gifted.

“Service gives what is expected. Hospitality offers the unexpected.”

In Give and Take, Psychologist Adam Grant writes that giving without expectation creates lasting trust and emotional loyalty. This psychological shift moves from contract (the transactional) to care (the personal), and has been well-explained by Social Exchange Theory (SET) since sociologist George Homans proposed the idea in 1958. SET suggests that people evaluate the balance of benefits and drawbacks in a relationship and will typically remain in relationships where the rewards outweigh the costs. Where the relationship is built on reciprocity and trust, this balance of benefits considers that relationship as well as the transactional risk-reward impact.

Hospitality operates like a gift economy, not a market economy.

It’s why Pret A Manger baristas are permitted to give away a few drinks a day for free, with customers often leaving glowing reviews over a £3 coffee. It’s why Disney cast members go out of their way to give unexpected extras that aren’t charged or expected: magical moments.

We often conflate employee recognition with employee praise.

Praise is service. It’s transactional and often impersonal. A templated “thank you” ecard, where recipient names can be exchanged. A gift voucher – the perfect way to show you don’t know the individual; “Here. You do it”, is the unintentional message.

Recognition is hospitality. It’s personal and highlights the specific impact of the behaviour or action, and the contribution that the individual made. It demonstrates that the recogniser has considered these details appropriately, and made a conscious, purposeful decision to recognise. Nothing dramatic; just care made visible.

Sincere recognition activates the brain’s reward system, reinforcing positive behaviours (Fehr & Gächter, 2002). It helps create emotional connection between the workplace and the employee. When people feel emotionally connected to their workplace, they’re more motivated, more resilient, and more likely to stay. In contrast, when work is all service – tasks, protocols, metrics – but no hospitality, people may deliver the notes, but they won’t feel the music. Disengagement sets in. Quiet quitting follows. Eventually, so does actual quitting

Service is the Job. Hospitality is the Culture.

Hospitality isn’t soft; it’s strategic and human. It underpins some of the most well-researched drivers of engagement and performance, from Amy Edmondson’s (1999) psychological safety (“Teams perform better when people can speak freely without fear of humiliation or retribution”) to Dan McAdams’ (1993) narrative theory (“People want to feel part of a story bigger than themselves”).

The psychologist Carl Rogers described a core condition for human growth as unconditional positive regard (1957). It’s the sense that we are valued not just for our output, but for our humanity.

In the workplace, this shows up as managers who genuinely ask, “How are you doing?” – and actively listen to the answer. When colleagues remember birthdays, not just deadlines, and leaders make people feel safe to speak, try, fail, and grow, we create the environment for hospitality.

In organisations, hospitality often erodes not from malice, but from neglect: When communication becomes transactional. When people are treated as resources, not relationships. When leaders manage for efficiency, but not empathy.

Ironically, some of the very tools meant to support employees (e.g., productivity trackers, pulse surveys, and AI-driven feedback) can feel dehumanising when not coupled with genuine human connection. The message becomes: We care about your performance, but not about you.

Creating a culture of hospitality doesn’t require a company-wide transformation overnight. It starts with moments, gestures and, most importantly, intentionality.

That intentionality subtly informs employees that they have been considered. Not just as a group, but as individuals. Their wants, needs and preferences have been part of the narrative by design – not by default or as an afterthought.

Culture change might start in equally subtle ways, such as:

• Rethinking onboarding: Focus not just on orientation, but on creating early emotional connection
• Modelling vulnerability: When leaders share honestly, others feel safe to do the same
• Creating micro-rituals: Weekly wins, personal check-ins, gratitude moments. Small things with big ripple effects
• Coaching for care: Train managers not just in performance management, but in presence and empathy

Hospitality is a practice. And like any craft, it gets stronger with intentional repetition.

Conducting Emotion

In an orchestra, it’s not just the score that makes the music. It’s the conductor’s intention, the shared energy, and the subtle cues that make each player feel like their contribution matters. The conductor’s baton doesn’t make a sound. But it sets the tone for everything that follows.

The same is true for teams and, as leaders, we’re not just responsible for strategy. We’re responsible for atmosphere. For emotional resonance. For the invisible signals that tell someone: You belong here. You matter.

To reword Maya Angelou: “People will forget the process. They’ll forget the policy. But they’ll never forget how you made them feel.”

Service is the job. Hospitality is the humanity behind it.

In a world where the workplace can be anywhere and where automation and AI are prolific, how we make people feel is what keeps them connected. And that – more than service, more than systems – is what makes a culture sing.

This leaves us with a final question to consider: Where in your organisation is service thriving, but hospitality missing?

References

Cialdini, R. (2001). Principles of persuasion. Arizona State University, eBrand Media Publication, 3(7), 2580-2592.

Cropanzano, R., & Mitchell, M. S. (2005). Social exchange theory: An interdisciplinary review. Journal of management, 31(6), 874-900.

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative science quarterly, 44(2), 350-383.

Fehr, E., & Gächter, S. (2002). Altruistic punishment in humans. Nature, 415(6868), 137-140.

McAdams, D. P. (1993). The stories we live by: Personal myths and the making of the self. Guilford press.

Rogers, C. R. (1957). The necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change. Journal of consulting psychology, 21(2), 95.

Treacy, M., & Wiersema, F. (1993). Customer intimacy and other value disciplines. Harvard business review, 71(1), 84-93.