Globally, restaurants face a daunting challenge to retain their staff, particularly the waiting staff, cashiers, and food servers. Unfortunately, there is no quick fix to resolve the high restaurant staff turnover that exceeds 50% annually. However, there are 28 recommended ways for restaurant owners and managers to adopt to ensure a lower staff turnover based on the full employment cycle of a staff
Hiring Tactics To Minimize Restaurant Staff Turnover
How to better identify staff with potential?
Potential experienced candidates might make a good fit here. However, there is also a challenge that these candidates might bring undesirable habits accumulated throughout their work.
So, I would suggest asking the reasons for the job departure. If the departing reasons are similar to the current work conditions, I would advise against hiring. But if you should proceed, be sure to manage the expectation right from the beginning.
What about the staff qualifications?
Working in a restaurant may not require a lot of skill sets or knowledge, so having some academic qualifications in the area of hospitality might help to set the candidates’ expectations. I wouldn’t guarantee this job requirement, but having graduated from a hospitality course may help to condition the mindset of the staff in a typical restaurant environment.
What about setting work expectations?
I believe this may be the ugly truth for you to share, but it’s better to do so than suffering the consequences later for losing your staff. The truth is, many restaurant managers undersold the work expectations during the interview and overwhelmed their staff with a high workload that leads to high staff turnover.
The costs of training a staff vary from restaurant to restaurant, and country to country, but the amount of downtime, recruitment, and re-scheduling other staff to stand in is potential tangible and intangible costs for you to bear.
Should you ask for references or a simple background check?
I strongly suggest doing background checks on your staff before making the hiring. This is an important step that you should never miss, but again, a great number of restaurants might be in desperate situations due to a lack of staff, and this important reference check is intentionally missed or ignored.
But if you have the luxury to do so, do check with the ex-colleagues of your staff on their helpfulness, teamwork, potential family problems, etc. Weigh the pros and cons before making the hiring decision.
Where should you place those recruitment ads?
Too many online and offline sources or sites to do so. I would strongly recommend diversifying your sources to avoid getting too many potential candidates from the same background.
I know this is challenging and not easy, but try as much as you can. Getting too many staff candidates of the same demographic might pose a potential staffing issue later, which may include mass resignations and so on.
Should you go for referrals from existing staff?
Again, this referral option looks good among many restaurant owners of taking an easy way out for quick replacements, but the actual cost might hurt when groups of staff start leaving together for other jobs. However, I wouldn’t recommend against this option too, but be in control to ensure that any fallout will not affect the staff morale and the business operations
Should you source or headhunt from competitors?
This question is too broad for an absolute answer, but I know many restaurant owners do so. In these cases, it’s not a direct hunt for skill set, but rather for the candidate staff’s attitude. Attitude is a soft skill that is too hard to train or equip, and it just varies from staff to staff.
In many cases, direct sourcing from competitors come at a higher price than normal wages, and this could set uneasiness among your staff who may not be happy about that wage difference.
So, unless if you are sure of what you are doing, I would suggest a normal recruitment drive as the better option.
Job Trial
Should you have a job trial for the staff?
In this case, I am not talking about the probation period, but rather a job trial to assess your candidate staff’s potential before you made that hiring decision. A job trial is good for both you and your staff because this would help to manage that expectation on both sides for a real long-term employment. From your staff’s perspective, it’s a better glimpse or preview of what work challenges to expect and overcome, colleagues, job expectations, etc.
From your perspective, you are assessing the suitability of your staff in the form of skill sets, potential teamwork, customer handling, etc. The job trial should last for a few days to a maximum of a few weeks. At the end of the trial period, you should have an open discussion with your staff to manage the job expectations.
Who can contribute to that hiring decision during the job trial?
From the restaurant manager-in-charge to the senior staff, working colleagues, chefs, and even customers. Yes, I mean customers in this case, because customers don’t hold back. They will call a spade a spade. You can expect to get the most straightforward answer from the customers. Opinions from colleagues might contain prejudice, potential grudges, jealousy, etc., but you need to weight these feedbacks before making that final hiring decision
Hired – Probation Period
How long should that probation period be?
There is no hard and fast rule on the probational period for new hires, and this varies from restaurants to restaurants. Typically, the industry practice is between one to three months. During probation periods, your new staff should have certain restrictions and fewer responsibilities to help them to cope with the accumulative workload.
I will highly recommend starting slow and gradually entrust your new staff with more workload. For example, some restaurants will not allow new hires to take customer orders until they are familiar with the menu items.
How to get the new staff up to speed and making lesser mistakes?
Shadowing a senior or seasoned staff is the best and easiest way to get the new staff up to speed. This is a good form of on-the-job training that must be provided by the restaurant. Your new staff can pick up the procedures of handling customers and food from the seniors, and learn some efficient tricks to smoothen their workload.
Well, we have been looking at the good side, the flip side includes acquiring bad habits or shortcuts that might be bad for your restaurant. At this stage, it might be good to involve the restaurant manager to be a part of the shadowing process to limit the negative training.
What other chores or tasks should be covered during the probation period?
Being new in the restaurant, your staff should familiarize themselves with taking orders from customers. Of course, this is one of the most important tasks to settle the customer in the restaurant. Once the order is taken, your staff should know how to input the order into the system by way of either an electronic system or the traditional paper process.
Your staff should ensure that the customer order goes to the kitchen for food preparations. Also, your staff should be familiar with the use of the cashier point-of-sales system, restaurant layout, bathroom location(s), and where food utensils and items are stored.
Hired – Training
How to equip your new staff on restaurant offerings?
The menu should be the first place to start with new staff training. Your staff should familiarize themselves with the items on the menu, starting from starters, main course, desserts, drinks, and any other food course. It is important to understand what each item suits what types of customers. For example, men might like more meat-based items, while women might like salads or vegetables.
Again, this is not a hard and fast rule, but your staff needs to recommend it appropriately to customers. Familiarizing the items on the menu gives the customer more confidence in your staff. Items on the main course, desserts, drinks, and special items should be at the fingertips of all your staff.
What about food and drink items on the menu?
Yes, I would highly encourage to have food tasting for new staff. Unfortunately, this is an expensive exercise, considering that it takes up reasonable ingredients and chefs’ time to prepare and cook the food items. So, it makes sense to consolidate a group of your new staff for the food tasting process.
To minimize food wastages, the chefs can cook a larger portion of a customer’s order and provide some part of the food for your new staff’s food tasting. Newer staff should know the portion of food per serving, ingredients used, cooking methods, etc. These are regular customers’ questions regarding their order, and it pays to equip all your staff with this knowledge.
What about handling nasty customers?
The technique of handling customers improves with years of work experience. It pays for senior staff to share their experience of handling nasty customers with the new staff. Roleplay is a great way to equip your new staff with the appropriate knowledge to handle those nasty customers.
Your new staff should know some appropriate or standard answers to handle rude customers. Again, it pays for your new staff to constantly check with seniors or yourself whenever they faced difficult customers.
Hired – Ongoing
What about pay?
At this stage, your new staff have successfully passed the training, survive the probation period, and should proceed to undertake heavier responsibilities without any supervision from the seniors or you. So, how should your staff be compensated? There is NO standard answer to this question, but it also depends on how much you value your staff.
All employees work for money, to pay their bills, put food on the table, plus any other leisure-based activities and some savings for the rainy days. Every restaurant should know the industry standard on employees’ pay and the years of experience. Additionally, I would suggest restaurant owners share some parts of their success (profit) with their staff whenever possible.
How about staff’s working hours?
Most restaurants are open more than 8 hours daily. Either the staff works more than 8 hours, or there are two shifts to handle the full day’s operation. Depending on the profitability of the restaurant versus the full hours of operations, you can either schedule the staff to go full daily operating hours or hire part-timers to fill the gap.
Alternatively, you can choose to get your staff to work full operation hours and rest them more during the weekdays. Unfortunately, all staff may be standing for long hours, and this may potentially lead to the development of cardiovascular diseases in some cases.
So, I will advise you to be more humane in handling your staff. As much as possible during off-peak hours or whenever there are lesser customers, allow your staff to be seated to release the pressure on their legs.
How to manage that internal conflict among staff?
LOL! This is a challenging topic to be discussed here. Given that there will be conflict even among best friends, let alone between colleagues? The textbook answers are always an impartial way to deal with these topics, but sometimes, even managers are biased. And therefore, many staff leave their job because they couldn’t tolerate their managers.
So, I will encourage you to investigate the problems from the perspective of both conflict-arising staff and advise or mitigate the issues accordingly. At times, the advice might be a bitter solution, but business priority comes first. But you should be more accommodating as much as humanly possible.
How to handle that customer tipping issue?
Again, this is an interesting topic that resides mostly in the United States. However, there are still many cases outside of the U.S., where the least expected customers would tip.
So, lets us focus on the U.S. Customer tipping is the livelihood that supports many staff, with amounts ranging from 15% to 25% or more. The issue is not about the amount of tipping, but rather which staff gets assigned to which table. Some staff are assigned to an average of 7 to 10 tables, while some restaurants go only for five tables.
However, the number of assigned tables is not just the issue, but rather which staff gets the customer is the issue. Many U.S. restaurants go on the round-robin method of assigning every customer to the group of working staff. However, at times when some staff are busy with their tables of customers, any new customers get assigned to the next available staff. But what happens when the skipped staff becomes available?
Does the staff get the new customer, or misses a full round before the next customer gets assigned to the staff? This entire arrangement gets messed up when the restaurant gets busy during peak hours. Some staff are too focused on getting more customers that they neglect their seated customers, which in-turn felt poorly on customer service.
Many U.S. restaurant staff left their job due to customer assignments and tipping issues. So, you need to be proactive in customer assignments to staff and offer to help their staff to attend to the customers whenever possible.
Outside of the U.S., many restaurants practice customer tipping sharing system. This means the staff are not allowed to pocket those tips, but pooling and share the amount among themselves and the kitchen staff. This is only fair because the kitchen staff will never get to face the customers, but work in a hot and intense environment.
Personally, I like the pooling and sharing of customer tipping, because this creates a fairer way of splitting the “bonus” among the staff. So everyone gets a piece of the reward for doing their job well.
What about that service charge on every customers’ invoice?
This is another challenging topic to even discuss among most restaurant owners. Many restaurants treat the service charge as a part of the profit that goes into paying staff wages.
Personally, I would agree to a certain extent, but this may be quite unfair to the staff, especially in those restaurants or countries where there is no customer tipping. Most staff suffer long working hours, potential customer abuses, conflict among colleagues, long-standing and working conditions, etc.
So, it is only fair that restaurants share a part of the service charges paid by the customer as part of incentives or bonuses. After all, most, if not all, staff work for money. It is the money that drives them.
What about sharing some profit as a bonus?
Globally, the food and beverage industry is a very challenging landscape, where restaurants face challenges from macro and microeconomics. From a macro standpoint, many restaurants are directly dependent on tourism-related activities, which proves to be seasonal in terms of business operation. From a micro perspective, competitions are merciless and unspoken among restaurants.
Restaurants adjust their variable costs that include hiring during the low season and ramping up their workforce during the peak seasons. This adjustment of costs helps restaurants to make some decent profit during low and peak seasons.
Many restaurants operate on a thin profit margin. I strongly encourage you to share some part of the profits with your staff whenever possible. All businesses should save sufficient to weather the rainy days, but be generous enough to share some profits with the staff. These staff have worked hard to prove their loyalty and should be compensated as much as possible.
What about other incentives?
Getting up to work on schedule, punctuality, and not taking any sick leave are possible performance measurements that warrant incentives to be given to staff on a monthly or quarterly basis. Medical care, dental, hospitalization cost reimbursements are a part of staff welfare that requires you to provide appropriate medical insurance for your staff.
These welfare perks add up as incentives to display appropriate tangible care for your staff. You must be creative to incentivize your staff whenever possible, to encourage and reward positive working attitude and behaviors.
What about ongoing training?
Staff and managers are always looking for ways to improve themselves, and this includes communication, customer handling, upselling, etc. There is no easy formula, but solely dependent on each staff and if they are honest enough to admit their shortfalls.
On the other hand, you should constantly assess potential areas of improvement for your staff. The ability of a manager to convince the staff about undergoing the appropriate training is not an easy task.
Many staff complains about the lack of training, but many of them refused to admit their competency shortfalls. So, you need to convince your staff to attend the training. Likewise, your staff should be honest to request relevant training to improve their skills.
What about customer conflict?
Customer conflicts are a daily affair for almost every staff. Most staff took the customer-first approach to ensure a great dining experience for the customer, but at times, losing themselves mentally.
You need to understand and empathize with your staff on such customer issues. Luckily, many restaurants and businesses have enacted “No Staff Abuse” policies to ensure that their staff is well protected from abusive customers. But having said this, customer abuses are still plentiful, so it is your job to ensure your staff are duly protected.
At times, you need to put a stand on staff first instead of the customer. But this is no easy feat because that sore customer might start spreading the negative experience that will cause the restaurant to lose more customers. But well, life goes on. As a customer, we ought to understand and empathize the harsh working environments of these staff. If experience is so negative, just walk away and never look back.
What about a lousy manager?
To simplified explanations, I tend to agree that lousy managers are everywhere. From handling conflicts between staff, and staff and customers, to being biased or opinionated in judgments, to the recommendation of promotions, bonuses, incentives, etc., many managers may not be that impartial in their decision.
In these circumstances, it is tough for the staff to escalate their concerns or unhappiness to the senior management (for a chain restaurant type) or the restaurant owner. In many instances, your staff may be helpless when faced with a lousy manager. Most staff suffer in silence, or they choose to quit or job hop.
You and your senior management need to monitor your staff turnover rate and find ways to conduct an exit interview whenever possible. If the common causes point toward a lousy manager, then it’s either changing the manager’s practice or the manager.
What happens when the staff finds work not fun or enjoyable anymore?
This problem of staff finding work no longer fun or enjoyable is getting more common, especially among the millennials. Back in the old days, most staff display higher tolerance toward managers and customers to secure their job and earn their wages to feed the family.
Now, it’s getting harder to find these staff. Job hopping is getting more common among staff, and perhaps it’s the responsibility of the manager to create some amusement for the staff. Sigh!! This is indeed challenging. I know.
In this social media era, many things don’t make sense anymore. In other words, traditional logic does not apply. Perhaps, embracing social media, or having staff to socialize more with customers like taking a selfie might create fun and get closer to the customer. It is up to your creativity for an enjoyable work environment for your staff.
Staff are no longer interested in a stringent working environment. So, instead of beating it, let’s flow with it. A little music, flirting, nonsense, and selfie, don’t hurt anymore, but helps to nurture a fun environment for both the customer and your staff.
What about staff being neglected or under-appreciated?
In the era of the current millennials, feeling neglected is a common phenomenon among these youngsters. Most of the time, the younger staff want the attention and be praised for doing the right thing or performed something out of their usual norm.
Such a feeling of attention and praise can be easily overcome by paying special attention to your staff. Well, I agree that this is an energy-draining process, but it’s becoming so common across all industries. So, you need to pay a little more attention to these staff that requires a little more attention.
But being under-appreciated can be a little more challenging. Paying a little more attention and regularly sing praises might be an intangible solution. Often, staff equates the tangible compensation aspect as being under-appreciated. I agree with most senior management and restaurant owners that there is only some much profit to share.
The proportion of profit sharing as bonuses is extremely subjective, according to individual staff performance (perceived). Most managers judge the staff performance, according to observations, and most restaurants do not have any types of performance evaluation platform in place.
So, the result of staff performance might not be as accurate as desired. I recommend having a regular open conversation between you and your staff to resolve the under-appreciation issues. It’s better to explain and manage that expectation before getting an unexpected resignation.
Finally, what about the customers’ assessment of the staff?
Thank you for your interest in this article. This is the last point and is one of the most important points that should never be missed if restaurants want to do better.
Ultimately, who gets to decide if the staff is doing a good job? It’s the customer. No doubt. Customer is the deciding factor to determine if your staff have performed their duty to ensure a good meal experience. Similarly, the customers decide if the food is good, and what would they like? So, what’s more important than knowing the customers’ assessment and experience, right?
Getting the customers’ responses or feedback can easily be done on a piece of paper or electronic. This is simple, never rocket science. However, I will like to point out the use of Graz.me – a platform that solicits customers’ feelings toward the staff. Graz.me further relays your business questions and promotional coupon to the customer as an incentive for providing that feedback or rating, while your restaurant increase return patronage.
Beautiful and win-win for all. There is a Free Plan to start if you are interested to find out more.
We have some good ideas for minimizing chef turnover too