Scaling Hospitality: Coaching Frontline Teams Through Growth

For more than two decades, Angela Haning has built her HR career within hospitality. She started in recruiting at Hyatt Hotels, building into her current role as vice president of human resources for Fox Restaurant Group. The organization is in high-growth mode, putting pressure on leaders to deliver positive experiences to guests in more locations. How does a hospitality brand keep up the pace without losing its footing?

Haning points to training and recruiting but emphasized the key role of performance management in holding everything together. SHRM spoke with Haning about what performance management really looks like for frontline, shift-based teams, and how HR leaders can build systems that meet employees where they actually work. 

SHRM: What makes performance management in the hospitality environment fundamentally different from a typical office setting?

Haning: Our people work in front of guests. No one is sitting at a computer or on an iPad. That means feedback has to happen in real time, shoulder to shoulder, and it has to be easy to execute and easy to explain. 

Inside the restaurant, I think about side-by-side coaching in two forms. There's coaching good to great — the work a manager does to help someone create better hospitality, often tied to metrics like sales or guest sentiment. Then there's coaching to correct, which means addressing a specific behavior that's causing concern.

As for once-a-year performance management, ratings don’t always deliver. People get caught up in what separates a 4.6 from a 4.7, and that misses the point entirely. It's about the behavior we're looking for and connecting the line of sight. Why is this person here? How do they find value in the work? How does that connect to our business model? In hospitality, we have career servers, servers working a second or third job, servers putting themselves through school. This means a manager's first job is understanding why someone is there and what they want. When you understand that, you can connect their behavior directly to the impact on the guest. That connection is everything. 

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SHRM: How can HR leaders design a performance management system that actually fits the rhythm of shift-based work rather than forcing a corporate model onto it? 

Haning: We built a formal system called our Quality of Operations and Leadership model — a competency framework specifically for our management team.

We have company values that set the behaviors we expect from every employee, including our corporate team. The model captures the business philosophies and the skills and abilities weexpect specifically from our leaders. Over the last two to three years, we've built a clear through-line from that document into everything we do. From our interview framework to our manager-in-training program, our entire employee life cycle is tied to these values. This creates a foundation to work from no matter the setting, whether an employee is working in our corporate office or on the floor of one of our restaurants. 

Secondly, when it comes to performance management for our management team, we rely on real-time feedback throughout the year. This allows us to center the annual review as a chance to take a beat and zoom out to look at the year overall in a three-part series. First, the manager self-assesses: What do I do well, and what am I still working on? Second, we have a conversation with the manager to walk through all those one-on-ones and assess together. Third, the manager commits to a development plan. Being crystal clear about the behaviors and philosophies we want — and then carrying that through-line from interview all the way to the review — is what makes the performance management system work.

SHRM: What does meaningful, timely feedback look like for frontline employees, and how can managers deliver it in a way that feels fair when so much of the work happens in the middle of a rush? 

Haning: People shy away from feedback. They shy away from direct feedback. But we have a philosophy at Fox Restaurants: sometimes a powerful conversation is the kindest thing you can do. Telling someone directly that their behavior is affecting others is not cruel — it's respectful. I'll acknowledge that this is genuinely hard for most people. Giving feedback is a muscle, and brand-new people leaders are uncomfortable with it. That's why we train on it early and keep training on it.

For coaching good to great, it's shoulder-to-shoulder. It might be asking a server, "Tell me what you saw in that interaction — what would you do differently?" It can also look like helping a server transition to bartending by working through the tools, the recipes, the rhythm behind the bar.  

For coaching to correct, we give our managers a simple equation: behavior plus impact equals the expectation. What did that person do, or not do, that is causing the concern? Connect it directly to the impact — on the people, on the business, on the environment. Then clarify the expectation going forward. In both cases, we can rely on metrics such as a server’s sales versus their tips or guest sentiment scores to signal improvement opportunities. 

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SHRM: If an HR leader in hospitality wanted to rebuild their performance management system from the ground up, what would you tell them to prioritize first?

Haning: Back into it. Start by understanding what you're actually trying to get out of the performance review. If it's that you need a rating to justify a merit increase, great, but you need to understand the purpose. If the purpose is development, then ask what will genuinely help you manage development. 

It also has to meet people where they are. Your employees are not sitting at a computer. They're on the floor and moving. They have to be receptive to the process — and it's unfair to expect someone to engage with a system that doesn't fit how they work. Remember, hospitality is how you make people feel. The experience is everything. Your performance management system has to support making your people great. Think about all the outstanding brands out there. Your competitive edge is your people.

Lastly, performance reviews should not happen once a year. You are not going to help someone improve by reviewing their performance annually. It has to be a continuum because your guests want a clear, consistent experience every single day — and that only happens when your people are being developed, coached, and seen every single day too.