Almost a decade ago, we were hired by a boutique hotel chain in Mexico City to help improve their culture and service. The brief was simple: make us better, in whichever ways we can be better, using NoTosh’s design thinking nous.
Our way into that kind of work is not especially mysterious. We listen to the people closest to the action. We observe what actually happens, not just what the org chart says should happen. We bring fresh ideas and co-create options for change, then look first for the things that might make the biggest difference while costing the least. Only after that do we work our way back towards the things that cost a lot, but might earn their place through a clear return over time.
In the hotel restaurants, the customer experience was stunning. Beautiful linen, great food from the regions of Mexico, thoughtful service, and tables overlooking a bustling city square. Every detail echoed the same message to the customer: you’re special.
Then we went behind the scenes. Staff were eating around chipped formica tables in the back rooms, choosing from a limited staff menu that never changed, consisting largely of unhealthy frozen processed food.
It felt unfair, and that unfairness translated into behaviour.
Staff would simply fail to show up for work. No warning, no phone call or sick note: one day, they’d just not appear. Managers would regularly find themselves pulled onto the floor to cover the gaps, and then the bigger work of leading, improving and fixing the system would start to slip.
One of the solutions proposed by the middle managers almost got laughed out the room by colleagues: put tablecloths and a fresh flower on the staff dining tables.
But we launched the idea that week.
A week later, I ended up on a video call with the CEO and COO. I expected an update on reduced absences and improved staff happiness, both of which we were already hearing about from the middle managers.
Instead, I found myself fielding genuine anger. They had paid a consulting firm thousands of dollars, only to be told they should put tablecloths on the staff tables. What a waste of money.
I understood the frustration. If you think the intervention is a tablecloth, it sounds absurd. But the design intervention was never about the tablecloth. It was about establishing a daily signal: as an employee, you matter here as much as the customers.
Three months later, the hotel group had saved more than four times the cost of our consulting through a set of small changes their own middle managers had designed, executed and owned.
No wonder people started turning up with a little more pride. No wonder service improved. No wonder staff attrition and late-coming reduced.
The hotel hadn’t wasted money on extra linen. They had reduced the daily cost of people feeling unseen and disregarded.
This is where most organisations miscalculate return on investment. They are quite good at pricing the cost of furniture, training days, consultancy, software and buildings. They are far less good at pricing the cost of unhappy staff.
Sickness absence, staff cover, attrition, recruitment, and emotionally withdrawn staff each have a massive a cost to the organisation.
The manager who spends the morning firefighting because three people have disappeared from the rota has a cost. The subpar lesson, the meeting people showed up late to, the negative parent conversation or the strategic decision that is less thought-through than it should be because everyone is running on resentment… all of it has a cost.
And when the plan goes out of the window, that cost compounds further.
If people are already stressed, cynical or running on empty, they do not begin a crisis from a neutral place: they start from a deficit. They have less goodwill to draw on, less energy to improvise, less patience with each other and less trust that any extra effort will be noticed.
I often hear folk talk about resilience as if it is a quality individuals should somehow possess, when quite often it is the result of hundreds of small organisational choices made long before the difficult moment arrives.
For that reason, current stories about the USS Abraham Lincoln caught my attention. The American aircraft carrier, with roughly 5,000 sailors and Marines aboard, has been reported as heading for rest and recreation in Thailand after more than 200 days at sea, following a prolonged Middle East deployment and reports of mental health concerns, low morale and deteriorating conditions aboard.
Now, none of us should pretend that a school, hotel or office is the same as an aircraft carrier operating in a conflict zone. It is not. But the human question is familiar:
What happens when people are placed under pressure for longer than expected, with less recovery than promised, while the plan keeps changing?
Chris Terrill, an anthropologist and documentary maker who has spent years embedded on warships, wrote about his time aboard the Royal Navy’s HMS Queen Elizabeth. Its 2021 seven-month operational deployment was already ambitious, but Covid disrupted the planned pattern of port visits and shore leave. The ship still had to remain operational, and yet Terrill argues that the Royal Navy’s culture gave people more ways to keep hold of their humanity inside a hard military system.
There are useful differences between the British and American Navy’s conditions that we can learn from. Even in a similarly highly disciplined, hierarchical, operationally demanding environment, culture is designed through details.
First, ‘community’ size. The USS Abraham Lincoln has 5000 crew; the British equivalent tends to carry just 700. So the HMS Queen Elizabeth feels closer to a floating village than a floating city.
Second, ‘boss norms’. Whereas the larger carrier operates through top-down hierarchy, the British ship reflects a “relaxed professionalism”, where authority is clear but does not need to dominate every human interaction. Terrill describes The Haven, an all-ranks café where people can leave “boots, overalls, rank and seniority at the door”.
Third, ownership and belonging. Terrill describes mess squares where sailors have some ownership over the spaces in which they live and relax.
Four, table clothes and porcelain. Where the US cafeterias serve comfort food 24/7, in metal trays (convenient, but giving penitentiary vibes) the Royal Navy keep mealtimes strictly communal, with a three-times-a-day meal, served on porcelain plates.
This is the part any leader can take a pause and think about.
In a warship, of all places, someone has understood that people need more than orders, systems and endurance. They need places that are not work, even when they are still physically inside work. They need rituals that mark time when days blur. They need humour, friendship, belonging and a version of hierarchy that does not require everyone to perform their status all day long. They need food that feels like a meal, not merely calories. And everyone appreciates a porcelain plate.
In other words, the apparently soft stuff is not soft: it’s infrastructure.
Schools understand this instinctively when it comes to students. We know the greeting at the door matters and that the mood in the dining hall sets the tone for two hours of afternoon learning.
We know transitions, rituals, assemblies, displays, routines and tiny moments of recognition can change how young people feel about their place in the community. We know a child’s behaviour is rarely just about the moment in front of us, but about everything that has happened before they reached that moment, at home as much as in school.
Then, oddly, we forget the same is true of adults.
A staffroom that nobody wants to sit in is not a facilities issue. A meeting culture that drains people is not an admin issue. A timetable that leaves no breathing space is not just a logistics issue. A leadership habit of only noticing people when something goes wrong is not a communication issue.
These are strategic issues, because they shape the human starting point from which every plan must be delivered.
Of course, tablecloths will not fix poor pay, weak leadership, impossible workload or broken trust. Small gestures become insulting when they are used to decorate deeper neglect. But when they are part of a pattern of respect, they can become load-bearing. They tell people that dignity is not reserved for customers, parents, governors or visitors. It belongs to the people doing the work, too.
So perhaps the better question for leaders is not, “Can we afford the consultants to help with this?” Perhaps it is, “What are we already paying because we haven’t?”