The hospitality manager, a combination of corporate concierge and space manager, coordinates the day-to-day use of work environments.
Managing the wellbeing of employees involves such diverse tasks as facilitating the use of the communication resources available in offices, adapting site services to user needs, arranging spaces to accommodate one-off events, and rearranging spaces to support planned changes in activities. In a number of pioneering service sector companies, these tasks have been shifted from corporate managers to what amounts to a new profession: corporate hospitality management.
“Hospitality management provides monitoring and ongoing coordination of the life of the company”
“While facility management coordinates corporate support services, hospitality management provides ongoing coordination and support for site use and the life of the company within it,” says David Ernest, Innovation and Energy Director at VINCI Facilities, the VINCI Energies brand, which recently acquired OPAL, a company specialising in hospitality management and corporate concierge services.
Ensuring a comfortable work environment
Like a hotel concierge, the hospitality manager ensures the wellbeing of employees at work by overseeing air quality, noise control and visual comfort, planning the use of space, ensuring optimum availability of communication tools, developing and integrating site services, and managing off-site travel.
“The responsibilities are those of a community manager, in the physical sense of the term. The hospitality manager coordinates and manages the use of work spaces and environments by closely observing the way each team operates,” says David Ernest. “This new profession calls for an ability to analyse, grasp the big picture and see things from the point of view of the end user. To understand how the facilities are used, the hospitality manager must observe and listen to employees and analyse the data supplied by the building IoT systems.
11/09/2017
