Why Staff Experience is Guest Experience

You can usually tell, within a few seconds, what kind of experience you're going to have at an attraction. Not because of the signage, or the lighting, or the layout - but because of the energy when you're getting served. Someone smiles and actually sees you & welcomes you. Someone else sighs, and waves you vaguely towards the café. Both moments cost nothing. Both change everything.

We spend a lot of time talking about visitor experience, but far less about the people who make it happen. You can’t design a guest journey that feels warm, calm, or human if the people delivering it are exhausted, invisible, or running on fumes. For all the talk about technology, storytelling, and digital transformation, it’s the human moments that make a visit. And those moments depend entirely on how the people behind them feel.

Front-of-house teams carry the emotional weight of a day out. They deal with confusion, delight, lost tickets, broken printers, and rain-soaked families. They’re the people who turn your diagram of a guest journey into an actual experience. You could spend millions on your exhibits, an app, or an immersive gallery, but if the person at the entrance feels unseen or undervalued, guests will feel it too. You can’t hide a bad culture behind a good brand, it just doesn’t work.

So, I’ve done a lot of spouting off there, but what actually creates a great staff experience? It isn’t complicated. It’s clarity, support, and trust. It’s back-of-house spaces that don’t feel like punishment. It’s the freedom to make small guest-facing decisions without waiting for permission. It’s being part of a culture that listens, not just instructs. When those things are missing, it leaks - in tone, in patience, in body language. If you don’t give staff room to be human and you just make them a cog in your machine, then eventually they will act like a machine with little emotion and no connection.  Guests notice that, even if they can’t name it.

And the opposite is true too. When a team feels proud, seen, and trusted, that pride becomes contagious. Take somewhere like Eden Project in Cornwall - a place that has mastered the art of making guests feel welcome because the people there clearly want to be there. You see it in the way staff chat easily with visitors, how volunteers point things out just because they think you’ll like them, and how everyone seems to genuinely care about the place. That atmosphere isn’t an accident. It’s culture. It’s the result of years spent building a workplace that feels collaborative and meaningful, where everyone, gardener to guide, understands their part in something bigger.

And no, I’m not suggesting that your summer hires are going to be as deeply invested in the mission as the management team. That’s not realistic. But connection still counts. It starts with people working somewhere they feel seen, supported, and valued - somewhere they actually enjoy showing up to. Pride doesn’t have to mean lifelong loyalty; it can simply mean caring enough to do the job well because it feels like a good place to be.

You can’t train someone into caring. You can’t fix this with a customer service course or a motivational poster. Empathy isn’t a skill you learn on a Tuesday morning. It’s a feeling you pass on when you have enough of it yourself. If staff feel respected, safe, and part of something that matters, guests feel the same. It’s the same emotional current - just running in both directions.

Every brilliant guest experience you’ve ever had probably started backstage, that may have been a rota that paired great staff, a manager who listened, a staff room that is actually relaxing and not a random back room. These things will never make the marketing copy, but they’re what hold everything together.

For every moment that makes a visitor smile there’s someone behind it who made that choice. They’re the back-stage story that most visitors never see. And they’re the reason the front-stage story works at all.