Bold retainers

Staff retention is still one of hospitality's biggest challenges, but some employers are fighting back with creative initiatives to entice employees to stay. Helen Osborne and Jessica Gunn look at how these are benefiting business.

There can't be many hoteliers who do not have problems with recruitment. And the industry is beginning to realise that it is not all about money. Reasonable rates of pay are still important, but so too are comfortable working conditions.

The need for hotels to make improvements in this area was raised at the launch of the Springboard UK careers festival last month. Lesley Reynolds, managing director of recruitment consultant Portfolio International, claimed that hospitality students were being put off the industry by their experience of staff accommodation. Many, she said, complained of cockroach and mouse infestations in corridors and bathrooms, while the most common illness was food poisoning from the recycled hotel food they were given to eat (Caterer, 18 October 2001).

Such employers have a lot to learn. However, with staff turnover rates as high as 48%, according to the Hospitality Training Foundation, many are getting wise to the need to offer something more than competitive wages to retain staff.

By investing £50,000 in a 54-seat staff restaurant, the Royal Bath Hotel in Bournemouth has halved its staff turnover. Opened in April this year to replace an old canteen, the restaurant is equipped with a salad bar, cold vending machines offering sandwiches and cold desserts, a soup plate and a hot canteen. A chef is employed specifically to cater for the 200 employees, who are not required to pay for their meals.

"We have the same challenges with recruitment as other hotels," says Rob Allan, the hotel's general manager. "The restaurant is to show our staff that we do value them and that they are as important to us as our customers."

Before the restaurant opened, staff turnover rate was between 4% and 6% per month, depending on the time of year. Now that figure has dropped to about 2% per month - or 24% per year. Investing in staff is proving vital financially, as the costs of training, retraining and advertising rise with turnover. "It's also a good sales piece and keeps us ahead of our competitors," says Allan.

In Guernsey, recruiting and retaining staff is a more acute problem, given that only 20% of the hospitality workforce are island residents. Hoteliers must not only entice international workers to come in the first place but, once they are there, persuade them to stay. In an attempt to compete effectively, the four-star St Pierre's Park, in Rohais, St Peters Port, has invested £1.5m in hotel-standard accommodation for its 100 employees. The result is 61 en suite units which, according to general manager Andr‚ Bourcier, are similar in standard to a Holiday Inn Express.

"By introducing a staff block, we have found we are able to attract a better standard of staff and then retain them in a highly competitive environment," Bourcier says. "We've also found it is easier to employ good chefs, who want nice accommodation as well as working in a nice restaurant."

Opened in March this year, the building is the largest purpose-built staff accommodation unit in the Channel Islands. "There are only three other four-star hotels on the island and none of them have staff facilities as good as ours," Bourcier claims. "Even if our staff are offered more pay, it can't compete with the accommodation." And he adds that the increase in staff retention is good for custom. "It is very important for our clients to see familiar faces when they stay," he says.

Training and career development are seen as the most valuable benefits of working for the Gleneagles hotel in Auchterarder, Fife, according to its annual staff survey. "Interestingly, this scores above our pension scheme, which is operated by Diageo, our parent company, and is among the best available," says resident manager Bernard Murphy.

Staff are also keen on a scheme introduced by the hotel three years ago to give fairer working hours. In an attempt to combat staff resentment, hours are now worked out on an annual basis, not a weekly basis, so staff work longer hours when necessary, complemented by shorter shifts when demand drops. "It means that we are not trying to take free time from staff if a function runs late, and towards the end of the year we can hold back on recruitment if people have not worked up to their 1,800 hours," says Murphy. The new scheme, which was devised in conjunction with consultancy firm Working Time Solutions, means that staff are fully credited for any overtime.

When they are not working, staff at the Foxhills Club & Resort in Ottershaw, Surrey, can take full advantage of the luxury sports facilities available, including golf, swimming and tennis. It is incentives such as this which have pushed staff turnover down to 7.13% per year and mean that some employees have stayed with the resort for 10 years or more.

Managing director Bryan Benson was so determined to retain staff that he came up with a mission statement: "to make Foxhills as good a place to work as to stay". Part of that strategy has been to ensure that live-in staff are housed in good-quality accommodation. There are 31 staff bedrooms, some on site and the rest in two houses a 10-minute drive away. In the past year, 12 of the bedrooms on site have been refurbished, at a cost of £3,000 per room.

Training is another important factor for staff. Foxhills, for example, has training programmes for staff involving practices such as role-swapping and advice on dealing with complaints.

And there are financial rewards to be had. Benson recently introduced a reward scheme in the form of "thank you" tokens which can be redeemed for £20. And staff can earn themselves £300-£1,000 if they introduce a new recruit. And this summer, seven departments were allocated a budget of as much as £4,500 each to take staff on a summer outing.

In total, Benson estimates that expenditure on incentives exceeds £100,000 a year, but he believes that the investment is worth it. "We have taken turnover from £460,000 [17 years ago] to over £8m and it has been down to rewarding people," he says.

Quite simply, Benson adds: "If we didn't offer these things, we wouldn't have the staff. Usually, you never see the same face in a hotel. But service and attention to detail are the reasons guests come back. We have to make the experience different."

Staff retention

• Unsatisfactory pay was the main reason given by 25% of those who had left hospitality jobs, according to the 2000 Labour Force Survey.
• The industry advertised 93,206 full- and part-time positions in JobCentres in the three months to July 2000, and three-quarters of these remain unfilled. This compares with 44% of unfilled positions during the same period in 1999.
• Labour shortages were particularly acute among chefs in the East Midlands, and waiters and waitresses in the West Midlands, South-east, East Midlands and North-east.
• In the West Midlands, unfilled vacancies for housekeepers were 100%, and in the East Midlands 98% of hotel porter positions remained vacant.
  Source: Hospitality Training Foundation

Factfile

Royal Bath Hotel

Bath Road, Bournemouth, Dorset
Tel: 01202 555555
Number of rooms: 140
Turnover: £8m
Number of staff: 200 full-time/contracted staff, plus about 50 casuals
Staff turnover: 2% per month/24% per year
Key staff incentive: purpose-built staff restaurant, opened in April 2001

Foxhills Club and Resort

Ottershaw, Surrey
Tel: 01932 872050
Number of rooms: 38 rooms, plus 14 houses and apartments
Turnover: in excess of £8m
Number of staff: 185
Staff turnover: 7.13%
Key staff incentives: all full-time staff can use the sports facilities in their spare time; staff accommodation

St Pierre Park Hotel

Rohais, St Peters Port, Guernsey
Tel: 01481 728282
Number of rooms: 131
Turnover: figure unavailable
Number of staff: 90 permanent, 110 seasonal
Staff turnover: figure unavailable
Key staff incentive: hotel-standard accommodation for staff

Gleneagles Hotel

Auchterarder, Fife, Scotland
Tel: 01764 662231
Number of rooms: 216
Turnover: £32m
Number of staff: 500
Staff turnover: 25-30%
Key staff incentive: fair working hours scheme; training