We have two staff meetings each week for our full-time team members. Typically, we have a part-time teammate on the schedule during these meetings to cover the front desk, answer the phone, and handle any customer requests. It's extremely important to us to have some uninterrupted time as staff to work together on operational issues and move our business forward.

On one of our staff meeting days, we had a very light schedule with only one group of guests in our retreat center. On slow days like this, we don't schedule any part-timers. So we had nobody to cover for us while we hid for our meeting. We're committed to these meetings, so we just held this one in our office, which is fully visible to the lobby and any guests who wanders by the front desk. We knew there was a pretty good chance of having to stop the meeting to fulfill a guest's request, we chose to meet where the guests had access to us since we always try to put our guests needs ahead of our own (even though these meetings, again, are extremely important to us).

Why this is one of our favorite sparks:
Sure enough, we were interrupted several times, and the meeting lasted longer than normal because we kept getting side-tracked. We were actually thrilled, not frustrated, because we were able to serve our guests without them ever knowing anything but "business as usual."