It is not uncommon to see restaurants post, “Sorry we will be closed tonight due to staff shortages.” Labour is a highly valuable resource in restaurants. When you find stellar employees, keeping them is key. We turn to Claire Stenhouse, Restaurant Manager of Attica, Alexandra Preece, General Manager of 400 Group and Steve Sidd, Managing Director of Catering HQ, for their tips and tricks for staff retention in their restaurants.
Staff longevity speaks volumes in the restaurant world. For Melbourne’s fine dining restaurant Attica, staff retention has explicit and implicit benefits to the business.
Stenhouse explains, “The ROI on training people means that they’re not going to leave, meaning that you can get consistency of excellence. I’ve got people in Attica that have been there literally 13 years, nine years, five years, and eight years. The newest person is one and a half years. What that means is you don’t have to pay for your onboarding, because that costs money. You’ve got people that you’re paying at full cost, at full price, for doing maybe 30,40, 50% of the work as they get it. So that’s a cost, right? Not having to hire all the time, and my time spent at Seek and LinkedIn is a cost. Avoiding that is one thing, but then working on building excellence, it can only come with consistency. And consistency can only come with retention. So, it’s a no brainer.”
For 400 Group with over 700 employees, Preece agrees that poor staff retention is a huge cost to your business, “If we have a lot of people leaving the business, it’s obviously costing us money. But you also must look at the wider cost of not having strong retention rates. It impacts other employee’s experiences when they see people come and go. We have training managers. It makes their jobs redundant if we don’t have retention because they’re constantly just having to go over the same thing. We’re not excelling in our service either, impacting guest experience. The cost of poor staff retention is far greater than the cost of hiring and training staff.”
Here are their 6 tips to staff retention:
- Providing psychological safety in the restaurant’s high-pressure environment
Stenhouse acknowledges the elephant in the room. Restaurants are high-pressure environments. “Rather than managing rosters or building on a roster to meet your KPIs, understand that you’ve got humans with limits, ambitions, goals and values. You want to align to the way that things are working.” She conducts four 1:1’s with her staff every year. She elaborates, “It’s not just a paper exercise where you tick the box. Two of them are performance based, and they’re quite they’re quite tactile. Two of them are around psychological safety. I ask each of them what their goals are. It’s about taking on a role as a leader to be very clear and to make sure they understand what the processes are and what the systems are. It’s about modelling the calm, and then talking to the human beings in front of you, not just talking to them, but really listening to what it is that they’re saying. They can feel when you don’t care, and they can really feel when you do as well. - Identifying Team Heroes and Opportunities
For Steve’s Catering HQ group working with 330 staff across the group, “I think where we’ve had the most traction is about opportunities and progression. Too often people come into a hospitality, they’ll come in and out like a revolving door, but really identifying who the heroes are on the team. It’s about having those one-on-one conversations and identifying what that pathway looks like to progress into further opportunities. Someone might come in as a waiter or a waitress, but today they’re our venue manager. Identify those heroes, find a pathway and offer them that progression. Having those close conversations, being open and transparent helps our team grow with us as we continue to grow.” - Celebrating Staff Milestones
In Catering HQ, we have a party for staff who reach the three years, five years and 10 years mark. It’s really giving back to our team, giving them that recognition. - Clearly Communicating Expectations with your staff
Setting clear expectations and where the business going is important. Reece says, “A lot of the time, you know what you’re doing. You know where you want to be at the end of the shift, at the end of the week, at the end of the quarter, and at the end of the year. But are you communicating that with your team? We’re in a fast-paced environment. Things don’t stop. It only gets busier. Communicating those clear goals and setting those expectations put you all on one journey together. It’s not the owner or the manager on the journey, with staff trying to chase after it.” - Consciously create your company culture with your staff
For Stenhouse, culture is key to staff retention: “Every single decision that you make, every single behaviour that part of your team member takes affects that culture. Every time, a new person comes in, it affects that culture.” You need to be clear about what behaviours are accepted. Have open conversation with your team and involve them. Say, ‘This is what our culture is. Is everybody on board with this? Does anybody have any suggestions on what the culture should be? This is the stuff that we’ve all agreed right now in this meeting. This is the stuff that we all hold each other accountable for.’ That drives excellent culture, and people want to stick around for that, because they feel like they’re driving it too.” - Have a people first mindset.
Preece believes that retention should be easy when you have a people first mindset: “Treat people how you want to be treated. Everyone is someone’s daughter. Everybody is someone’s son. You know, sometimes, hospitality is not for them. Be caring enough to let them know to cut it short. Don’t let they stay in an environment where they don’t feel safe, where they’re not comfortable, and where they’re not excelling. It’s not for everyone. Care about your people, and retention should be pretty easy.
