Meet Berlage Amsterdam

In the hospitality sector, knowledge is often the first casualty of high turnover. At Meet Berlage, a premier hub for events and workspace in the center of Amsterdam, critical information was a moving target. For hospitality staff, the "right way" to do things lived in fragmented documents, fleeting Slack and WhatsApp messages, and the institutional memory of a few key veterans and a several managers.

When information is everywhere, it’s effectively nowhere; specially in a big place as Amsterdam's monumental Beurs van Berlage building, where staff moves around constantly. That is why we built a single source of truth designed for the palm of a staff member’s hand.

- Anonymous Meet Berlage employee

The hospitality environment is uniquely demanding. At Meet Berlage, the friction wasn't caused by a lack of communication, but by a lack of structured, accessible knowledge. The team faced:

• High staff turnover: A constant cycle of onboarding new or temporary workers and interns.

• Information Decay: Procedures changed faster than the documents could be updated.

• The WhatsApp trap: Critical procedures were buried in high-volume chat threads.

• Mobile-first reality: Staff don’t have desks; they need answers on the floor, mid-shift, via their phones.

The result: repeated questions, inconsistent execution, and a heavy reliance on supervisors to provide the same answers over and over.

The breakthrough was realizing that Meet Berlage didn't have a "communication" problem. In fact, they were communicating too much.

Most companies think they have a knowledge problem, so they buy a tool. But Meet Berlage already had the information; it was just trapped in their Google Drive. We didn't need a new place to put files; we needed a user interface for operations.

We also identified that the volume of communication was the enemy of execution. In a high-pressure hospitality environment, "sending a message" is often mistaken for "sharing knowledge." But for a staff member on a 10-minute break or a busy floor, a WhatsApp thread is a labyrinth and a finding the right Google Doc is like a needle in a haystack.

To improve the execution of operational tasks, we had to stop pushing information to people and start placing it where they would naturally encounter it. We decided we needed to shift the focus from communication (the act of telling) to architecture (the ease of finding).

This wasn’t a software exercise; it was a behavioral intervention. We focused on four core disciplines:

• Information architecture: We ignored "org charts" and built a structure based on context and urgency. What does a staff member need to know right now while standing at the bar?

• Knowledge design: We scrapped 20-page manuals. We rewrote content to be short, actionable, and scannable on a smartphone screen.

• Service & workflow design: We integrated reporting (broken items/inventory issues) into the same space as the instructions. By making ours tool useful for daily tasks, we ensured adoption across the whole spectrum of responsibilities.

• Behavioural Design: We designed the system to be the path of least resistance. By making it faster to check the phone than to find a manager, the tool became a natural habit rather than a task. And by stimulating staff to comment and provide feedback on the content, they became owners of the knowledge, not just consumers of it. Mind you, for a lot of people this way of working was new, so we needed to train them in teams and individually, and follow-up on the rate of adaption.

The impact was immediate. Within just four weeks of launching the ecosystem, the operational culture at Meet Berlage underwent a significant shift:

• A drastic decrease in noise: The volume of repetitive questions dropped significantly. Staff no longer had to wait for a supervisor to move forward; they had the single source of truth in their pockets.

• Cross-functional alignment: More then ever, staff had a clear view of what their colleagues in other functions within the company were doing. This visibility broke down silos between the bar, kitchen, and event teams, leading to a much more cohesive operation.

• Proactive service recovery: Because reporting broken items or inventory shortages became instant and frictionless, issues were addressed and fixed faster than ever before. Service levels rose because the lag between a problem and a solution was eliminated.

• Agency and pride: Most importantly, the system gave both staff and management a sense of agency. The team felt empowered by "real technology" that actually worked for them.

By removing the mental load of simple questions like "where do I find this?", the staff were freed up to focus on their true purpose: ensuring every customer has a great day at the venue.

- Hans Huijsmans, owner