Mum's
When Naomi McKenzie was promoted to president of what is now Sodexho Marriott School Services (MMS) in the USA, her first thought was for her children. To accept the job would mean relocating from Chicago to Washington, DC, and she wasn't sure she could uproot them.
This is the type of dilemma faced by many high-powered women in the hospitality industry. The difference is that, in McKenzie's case, it wasn't a problem for long - MMS simply moved the headquarters 671 miles to her.
The gesture is not as dramatic as it sounds in that many of her team were already based in other cities, keeping in touch by phone, e-mail and fax. The point is that it could be done, so it was.
What it also illustrates is that this foodservice giant doesn't want to risk losing highly trained female staff simply because of domestic difficulties. McKenzie was valuable, having handled scores of healthcare accounts in her 21 years with the company while losing only one client. And its flexibility has paid off - McKenzie has doubled the business since accepting the position in 1992, and in 1997 profit growth rose by 20% over the previous year.
This commitment to female staff was sealed in 1990 when MMS's then-parent Marriott International recruited Donna Klein to set up the Work Life programme based at the company's Washington headquarters. With a background in human resources, her remit was to harness the skills of working mothers by meeting the needs of their personal lives. This, in turn, addressed the urgent problem of high staff turnover in a tight labour market.
"Traditionally, companies offer medical benefits and so on. But can you retain employee loyalty?" Klein asks. "That's what we're going after."
In the early days, the offering was simple - advice on child development, parent education, childcare subsidies and discounts on childcare equipment. Now, the emphasis is on work-place flexibility. Among schemes on offer are flexitime, reduced workload, working from home and the compressed week - working 40 hours in four days. "We must get away from the working week and working day," Klein says.
She concedes that most of the pilot schemes have been carried out with managers, but stresses that "increasing flexibility in the ranks" is now top of the agenda. And although Work Life was initially driven by the growth in the numbers of working mothers, it now recognises the existence of working fathers and the fact that many employees are not in traditional family units. As a result, Klein and her five staff look at broader issues, such as the effect of overwork on parenting responsibilities.
One recent scheme includes a service whereby employees can talk to social workers confidentially on issues ranging from childcare to substance abuse. "We have recognised the need to treat employees holistically," says Klein.
The annual cost to Marriott for all this is $2m-$3m (£1.25m-£1.87m). So far, Klein says, there has been a significant reduction in stress, absenteeism and lateness, and annual staff turnover has decreased from 48% to 38%, although this could be partly attributed to a robust economy.
MMS is certainly confident about the scheme, indicating that it may continue to use Work Life as a consultant now that it has split from Marriott. "We are using Work Life as a way to positively brand the company," says Klein, who estimates that Marriott's programme is eight years ahead of the rest of the US hospitality industry.
So where does that leave the UK hospitality industry? At London-based Gardner Merchant (GM), human resources executive Laraine Kemp has no doubt that the question of working mothers needs to be addressed.
"We have recognised that, as an organisation, we invest a lot in training," she says. "Second, there is a skills shortage - we are having problems and a lot of the people we lose are women. Our view is that they are the type we want back, so we need to offer more alternatives."
To stem the flow of what is becoming an insidious brain drain, the contract catering giant set up an equal opportunities working group in the summer to find ways of making employment more family-friendly.
The eight-strong working group, comprising representatives from a range of departments including secretarial, operations and training, have started discussions. On the table are ideas such as job-sharing, working from home and part-time work. The recommendations, which are expected soon, will require the approval of the board and will apply to both men and women.
To find out what staff want, the group has contacted women who have left to have a baby in the past two years and haven't returned. Most commonly cited reasons were that the company did not offer job-sharing, career breaks or childcare.
Besides gleaning ideas from clients in other industries, such as Shell and United Distillers, Kemp says that she expects to learn a lot from the UK arm of MMS, which was acquired by GM last autumn.
Kemp's research so far indicates that there is no real cost to being flexible. She says that allowing a well-trained employee to have a career break is not a problem, as a replacement would have to be recruited if they left anyway. In fact, she claims, part-time work and job-sharing could prove economic because, if participating staff agree to cover holidays and possibly sick leave, the company could save money on agency fees.
And it's a long-term investment. "If we give someone the chance to work one day a week, they may return full-time in a year, and then we will benefit," says Kemp. "We have lost a lot of good people in the past because we haven't been flexible enough. Some parts of the business [at Gardner Merchant] have been good about keeping people in the past, but now we need a policy in place."
This is fine for managers, but it is obviously harder to accommodate catering staff, as they have to be on site. Chefs, for example, start at 7am, which makes organising childcare difficult, while providing childcare on site requires the client's agreement.
The key, Kemp believes, is to manage people more creatively. "Managers need to change their attitudes," she says. "They need to think, ‘Can this job be done in a different way?'"
Angie Risley, human resources director at Whitbread Hotel Company, agrees that the issue of offering more flexibility cannot be ignored. She is particularly concerned as a high proportion of managers are women. "We put a lot of investment and time into training and developing people," she says. The company invests, on average, more than £1,500 per manager trainee per year on a two-year programme and generally has 37 graduate trainees on board.
Risley says the company approaches the working mother issue in two key ways: by keeping people in touch with work when they are on maternity leave, and by treating each case individually. She says that, although she encourages women to return part-time initially with a view to working full-time, it is possible in some cases to provide permanent part-time work. "The critical thing," she says, "is that women are driving what happens to them."
As yet, Whitbread does not have a career-break policy in place, partly because the company is waiting for the EU's Parental Leave Directive, expected next June, which will most likely entitle both men and women to a three-month break between the birth of their child and its eighth birthday. Job-sharing is allowed, however, and the company even provides fax machines and computer facilities for home workers. But again, this level of flexibility is only feasible for those in head office positions.
However, the nature of the hospitality business means that there are some managers who cannot reasonably expect their personal needs to be accommodated. For Susan MacIntyre, 30, assistant general manager at the Sports Café in London's Haymarket, 1 December loomed large. It marked the end of her maternity leave and the start of a period of juggling responsibilities at home and work. She tends to work 70-hour weeks, is in charge of 45 staff and has to work shifts, sometimes not finishing until 3am. "I'm not too happy, but if you want to work in the restaurant industry, you can't say you won't work nights," she says.
MacIntyre, who has worked in the industry for nine years, left in June and was given the statutory minimum maternity benefit of about £57 a week and was guaranteed her job back. There is no concession to her now being a mother, though, and her biggest headache is sorting out childcare. "The Sports Café said I could take more time off if I need it as unpaid holiday," she says, "but financially I need to work."
Ideally, MacIntyre says, she would like to ease back into work, but she realises this is impractical in the restaurant world. "I also considered a career break," she adds, "but I felt the longer I was out of work the worse it gets."
Roddy Watt, joint chief executive of recruitment agency Berkeley Scott, says that the skills shortage is so critical that if companies aren't thinking along the lines of flexible working conditions then they should be. "By the time people are 35, they are optimum to the company," he adds. With a Joint Hospitality Industry Congress report stating that 86% of employees in catering are women, and with many leaving motherhood until comparatively late, the implications of this don't need to be spelt out.
