Staying Motivated to Provide Hospitality - Veerle Donders, Zoku

Josiah: 0:00

How do you stay motivated? Whether you're feeling recharged or a bit burnt out as we head out of the summer, I want us all to reconnect with why we work in hospitality as we head into the fall. To help us do that, we're learning today from Veerle Donders, Director of Concept and Brand at Zoku.

Josiah: I was talking to some friends recently and they're saying "I'm so tired." How do you personally stay motivated?

Veerle: 0:45

Yeah, I think for me, I really believe in what I do and for me, motivation comes from the fact that when I have conversations with people staying here or people working here and they're just really happy, that makes me, that's for me enough to get my energy from. And, to be honest, we opened Paris this week. I was doing a lot of work let's just say that not a lot of life, but a lot of work. But because I really believe in what we're doing here, and then I got to over the weekend, sit down, have dinner and look around me and seeing all these really happy people around me, I was like, okay, that's why I do it. Sometimes I get tired too and I'm like, oh, I'm just working so much, especially for an opening, of course. But when I see people come out of that elevator and experience Zoku for the first time, that's for me, that's. I just love what I do. So I feel like, of course, you can burn out, but if you really believe in what you do and you feel like you're actually adding to people and to people's lives, then it's hard not to be motivated because, yeah, you're actually being productive in that sense right.

Josiah: 1:44

I appreciate how you spend so much time on these properties listening to guests, because I think the more distance you get from that spirit of hospitality, you can lose touch, right? And so when I was in this company that was doing guest feedback, a lot of times I would be in the corporate offices of hotel brands and it would be some suburban office park and bad lighting and low ceilings and cubicles and it could be any other business. I totally lost touch with hospitality. Honestly, it's why I'm doing this now to reconnect with what is the joy of hospitality, and it sounds like you do that through participating in these dinners and so you don't. You never lose touch. It doesn't just become a spreadsheet or, you know, a business concept.

Veerle: 2:27

No, it's very true. I think that the easiest thing to do, especially when you move through the ranks is to lose touch. But I've been lucky enough. I started 11 and a half years ago as an intern and then I worked my way up to where I am now. But that means that I, when we opened Zoku in Amsterdam, I became a duty manager. So I was on the floor, I was a community manager, I was a brand manager, so I was always talking to people, and after being a community manager, you can't go back to just not talking to people, because that's what you're doing it for. It made it very easy for me because I understand the operational side of it, but I feel very at home in connecting with the people side of it, so being a community manager is just in my blood a little bit still. So, yeah, I love going to the Zoku and actually experiencing it as if I were a resident or a guest, but also being able to talk to people and ask them like hey, so what do you think? And especially, what did you not love? And like what can we do better? Love asking that question....