Training is the key to retaining staff
If staff turnover isn't your greatest ongoing challenge, you are either operating on another planet or you have employed the services of a robotics company. Every operator that I have talked to during the past 12 months has identified staff recruitment/turnover as their number-one challenge, the one looming obstacle that seems to prevent their otherwise successful businesses from getting ahead.
Restaurateurs nowadays routinely spend thousands on recruitment advertising and sometimes do not get even a single reply. No one, however famous, is immune from this crisis. Staff shortages have an enormous impact on our ability to serve our clients as well as we would like, sucking a lot of the fun out of our business into the bargain.
In short, we are in a vicious circle, which can be summarised as follows:
It's difficult to attract skilled and qualified people into the industry.
The employees we do attract are unskilled and unqualified.
Unskilled and unqualified employees contribute to holding down pay, which in turn contributes to high staff turnover.
High staff turnover discourages staff training - they leave anyway.
Poor training means employee skills, job satisfaction (and pay) remain low.
Therefore, the industry needs to constantly call on a large pool of new staff.
But the negative image of the jobs in the industry - low pay, poor training, low status - discourages youngsters from joining the industry.
However, steps can be taken to ease our burden. First, the trick for making our industry attractive to potential employees is for management to learn to engage all their staff's attention and keep them mentally challenged throughout their careers.
People, even entry-level workers such as kitchen porters, increasingly look for work not just to sustain themselves, but for personal fulfilment. If managers wish to retain their employees, they must strive to give them this sense of job fulfilment. Senior management must be prepared to put sufficient time, energy and resources into ensuring that junior managers train their staff effectively.
Many managers concentrate all their energies on hiring people, rather than training and developing the people they already have. But if they could persuade existing employees to stay, they would spend much less time recruiting new ones.
Studies have shown over and over again that people leave their jobs most often because they are underappreciated and undertrained. People prefer to feel that their expertise is unique - that their presence is necessary to ensure the success of the restaurant, as the following story shows.
Two men were laying bricks. The first was asked, "What are you doing?" He answered, "Laying brick." "What are you working for?" "£3.60 an hour."
The second man was asked, "What are you doing?" He answered, "I'm helping to a build a great cathedral."
Creating a work environment in which people feel they are "building cathedrals" is an important management skill.
But let's remember that the training process doesn't end once the employee has learned the initial job functions. At great restaurants and hotels training is a philosophy, not a department. A well-trained member of staff helps acquire and maintain more customers, and the training helps you to acquire and maintain better employees. Continual training - that is, continual structured education - is crucial.
True, training is expensive. But if you think it's too expensive, try ignorance. Better-trained employees get the job done more quickly and more efficiently, and are happier. Moreover, they provide their employers with a distinct advantage over their competitors - not to mention their competitors' recruitment efforts.
Let us not kid ourselves: the problem of staff shortages and recruitment will not go away. But by applying ourselves to training and development, we can greatly alleviate our staffing problems - and possibly put some fun back into our business.
Michael Gottlieb is president of the Restaurant Association and proprietor of Café Spice restaurants and Pencom (Service That Sells)UK
