How to reduce employee churn in hospitality

Your people have an impact on every part of your business, from the obvious customer service and keeping the venue clean, minimising waste and maximising profit through to keeping everyone safe and encouraging repeat trade. They are the embodiment of your operation and there’s no doubting that the way you deal with recruitment, onboarding, training, motivation and remuneration will have a significant bearing on how your business performs. 

In a recent survey of hospitality operators commissioned by Access Hospitality[1], 26% of respondents said that employee churn was a key concern for them. And when asked what their best return on investment was in 2018, 47% reported that it was controlling costs and 36% mentioned improved training, so people really do matter to business success and recruiting and retaining the very best talent available remains a top priority.

The importance of a well-trained member of staff who is given appropriate recognition and remuneration for the hard work they do, can’t be overstated.  By putting processes in place to recruit the right people and provide them with the best working environment possible, the relationship is more likely to be a winning combination. And, thankfully, you’re not on your own. There is hospitality HR software to help you manage your workforce, but if you’re serious about developing a fruitful relationship with your team, how can you use it to its best advantage?

1. Recruitment

Ditch the labour-intensive manual system and use technology to find, select and recruit the best people for your business. Cloud-based software can be used to develop recruitment processes and manage candidates throughout their contact with you and is particularly valuable for multi-site hospitality operations where duplication or missed opportunities are common if not managed carefully.

Consider how technology can help you improve every aspect of your recruitment process, from simplifying your vacancy workflow, sharing opportunities with job boards and keeping candidate management as simple and effective as possible. Online assessment scoring and recording interview outcomes can also help generate a talent pool for future vacancies and draw attention to potential recruits at other sites.  

Once appointed, don’t wait for staff to start their first shift before you have further contact with them, giving them the chance to cool off and lose their enthusiasm. New starters should be able to access briefing materials and joining details remotely, so they know exactly what is expected when they walk through the door and, by entering their own details in advance, they can help eliminate duplicated data entry with all their reference information collected.

2. Training

Training shouldn’t be an optional extra and nor should it be an afterthought, so a comprehensive end-to-end cloud-based training management solution is essential to make sure that hospitality operators who want to up-skill head office personnel, general managers or front and back of house staff make it a priority. 

Hospitality training software that enables operators to arrange and manage internal and external courses and automatically integrate staff training absences into operational rotas as well as notifying relevant stakeholders about results and qualifications can be both motivational for the employee and free up admin time to focus on employee satisfaction and improved customer service.

The Access Hospitality survey found that over a quarter of hospitality operations spend nearly one day a week on administration and if this could be reduced by two hours a week, they would choose to devote more resource to focus on guest experience (56%), training staff (44%) and engaging front of house staff (28%). Streamlining the admin processes around training could therefore be a great start in focusing more on the delivery and interaction than updating spreadsheets.

3. HR and workforce management

A streamlined human resource and people management process is particularly important within busy, multi-site hospitality environments to ensure things run as smoothly as possible and intuitive cloud-based software will help put you in control. 

As today’s workforce moves towards mobile technology, they’re more likely to engage with a self-service portal to manage their profile, book holidays, request training and view payslips than trying to reach HR at Head Office when they’re on a break during their shift. 

Attendance, holidays and sickness can also be time-consuming and potential points of conflict when handled manually, so having clear guidelines and business systems in place means that everyone knows they are being treated accurately and fairly.  

An attendance solution also ensures that hospitality staff scheduling and labour optimisation are automatically factored in, with available shifts identified and filled quickly and a reduction in times when there are too many staff on duty, becoming disenchanted when they don’t have the opportunity to shine.  You might even want to consider tying in with the weather forecast if your venue is affected by variations in the conditions.

4. Payroll and expenses

With the complexity of shift patterns, flexible hours, overtime and multi-site roles, the hospitality industry faces some of the most complicated remuneration procedures. Add in expenses and tips and many people just put queries in the ‘too difficult’ pile.

Recognising the contribution that your staff make to the business and keeping hospitality payroll payments transparent will go a long way to gaining their trust, commitment and loyalty.  With everything logged online and employees given mobile access, queries are reduced and automatic links to HMRC also simplifies tax notifications and records.

And if you’re still struggling with piles of paper receipts, many of which go missing and generate frustration and agitation, a simple step is to upload scans, pictures and electronic receipts to the cloud.  With online management, expenses can be submitted, viewed and approved (or rejected) in an instant reducing the time taken for your most valuable assets to chase their payments.

5. Hospitality performance management

There’s nothing worse than thinking you’re doing a good job, but not getting any praise, encouragement or feedback from those around you, especially your line manager, or wanting guidance or further development and no-one being there to help.  Although busy, multi-site hospitality operators should regularly review performance and give recognition, evaluate development plans and monitor performance against KPIs if their team is to fulfil its potential.  By spending more time with the individual and less time on the admin processes, performance reviews will be more productive as will monitoring of probation periods, disciplinary and grievance procedures. 

Streamlining recruitment and HR management processes helps get the best out of people, optimising staff potential and plugging the skills gap.  Providing a straightforward and easy access system keeps staff motivated and engaged, reducing churn and making sure that every aspect of business that they touch – customer service, loyalty, waste control to name but a few – they do so with the care and attention they would if it was their own business.

A recent study, commissioned by Access Hospitality, surveyed operators throughout the UK to find out how they’re tackling people management challenges and where they’ve seen the best return on investment, over the past 12 months.

Find out what tactics your peers are using to:

• Minimise staff churn
• Strengthen employee engagement
• Attract a new generation of talent
  
  

Download your free copy of this comprehensive trends report to get a full insight into what is keeping your peers up at night and the business-critical tools they’re implementing to increase customer satisfaction and profitability, through employee engagement.

[1]  The Access Group, Hospitality Trends Report 2019, April 2019