F&B is an industry that constantly experiences high employee turnover rate due to its fast-paced and stress-inducing environment. As a food and beverage entrepreneur, it might not be possible to completely eliminate turnovers. However, you can still keep it at a manageable level.
To lower your staff turnover rate, keeping your staff happy is a major key. You’ll save a lot of time and cost by retaining your current staff instead of hiring new ones. Retaining staff helps to reduce staff turnover rate and decrease recruitment cost.
There are 5 keys to keeping your staff happy:
- Create a positive workplace environment
- Provide good pay and compensations
- Invest in restaurant automation
- Rewards and recognition
- Staff training and development
1. Create a positive workplace environment
The main task in the F&B industry is dealing with varieties of customer types and behaviors. Some can be pleasant, and some can be challenging to deal with. Hence, creating a positive environment can help to boost your staff energy and motivation significantly.
A positive environment comes from good teamwork and communication. Your staff don’t have to be best friends with each other, but having good teamwork can help to propel a team’s dynamic and support. Besides that, ensure each of your staff are allocated appropriate amount of hours. Recognizing underworked and overworked staff can foster good workplace culture and avoid internal conflict among them.
On top of that, communication is the key to creating a positive workplace environment. Providing constructive feedback and asking about their wellbeing can help them to open up about matters that can affect their work performance. After dealing with various sorts of customers, you surely want your staff to work in a good state.
2. Provide good pay and compensations
Let’s get real. No matter how good a workplace environment is, it cannot compensate for low salary pay. Based on Black Box Intelligence and Snagajob’s post-pandemic study on the restaurant industry, the #1 major reason employees search for other work opportunities is to receive higher pay.
Complying with the minimum wage set by the government is not sufficient. As an employer or manager, you should do a research on similar restaurants in your area’s pay wage and compare them to yours. It’s a great step in retaining your staff because you’re providing a reasonable perks and salary for them to continue their excellent work.
You might need an extra hand here-and-there from your staff; sometimes on work outside of their working hour or job scope. Prepare a proper compensation framework such as overtime pay, allowances, and annual leaves entitlements can definitely benefit your business in the long run.
3. Invest in restaurant automation
As your restaurant business continues to grow, it will require more reliability to operate smoothly. This can cause immense pressure on your staff to keep up with advanced pace at your premise. Adding a touch of automation in your restaurant will help to lessen the pressure on your staff, especially the newbies.
By investing in restaurant technology, your staff can rely on the smart system to handle crucial tasks that need utmost accuracy such as taking orders. For a starting point, you can invest in a point-of-sale system like Slurp! that can streamline your operations in the simplest way. Slurp! not only can take orders, it also can handle payment integration, stock inventory, and also staff clock-in in just one device!
Your staff can focus more on serving guests instead of troubleshooting errors during working hours , just let the system navigate the operation. In a way, your staff’s stress and workload are lessened when you adopt automation in your restaurant.
4. Give rewards and recognitions
It’s easy to overlook employee’s achievements in a work culture that chases profit day-to-day. As much as it’s important to set targets, don’t neglect your staff’s hard work to achieve those targets.
Rewarding your staff can help to make them feel their contribution is meaningful in their job. Plus, reward programs will drive their effort into achieving one common goal and less likely to leave their current job feeling undervalued. You may set up rewards in any forms like cash incentives, extra leaves, or small gifts.
Try to recognize and appreciate each of your staffs’ best traits and skills from time to time. You can give compliments and show gratitude to them when they do well. Be aware of recent improvements on certain weaknesses they might have and always encourage them along the way.
5. Staff training and development
Staff training and development programs can help to equip them with skill sets to face various challenges in the F & B industry. It also shows that you and the management are invested into the staff’s future with your business.
There’s a significant correlation between happy staff and skilled staff. It is because when one feels confident with his or her equipped skills, he or she is inclined to be self-motivated and accomplished in the workplace. Thus, the more you help your employees to develop skills at work, the more they’ll appreciate you.
Workers also tend to stay longer if they believe there is a growth path available to them in the business. Look for ways to empower and delegate tasks to ensure staff can grow into supervisor or managerial roles in the future.
Attract quality staff
Hiring quality staff for your restaurant requires defined work culture and goals. From there, you’d know what to expect from prospective candidates that will be part of your business. You could make use of your current quality and happy staff through a staff reference program and accelerate hiring and filtering processes.
You can refer to our interview questions as a guide on what to look for when you’re hiring restaurant staff.
Bear in mind…
Turnover is inevitable, but you can keep it under control with diligent efforts. Learn more about effortless F&B and retail outlet management by signing up for Slurp! Newsletter.
