How do you slow staff churn?
Staff churn in the UK hospitality industry has been significant since Covid. Add in the shortage of available staff, payroll inflation, the net cost of team training, as well as expected team performance/guest expectations, and it’s not an easy ride for hotel leaders.
The need to genuinely invest in your team has never been greater, but wages alone won’t fix everything.
Key to a vision of colleague success is establishing a journey for each of your team members that focusses on how they as an individual can develop both personally and professionally. The pre-covid culture of just providing job role generics by rote during induction and letting people flatline for the rest of the tenure is not now viewed as acceptable in the post covid era.
It’s important for business leaders to put themselves into the mind set of their staff, regardless of age or job role. Imagine working to minimum wage forever and then funding personal and professional growth.
Shape your team for the engagement journey.
Your team have expectations in their own life and generally they need as much money as they can to fund it. Whether it’s where their next car is coming from, their next holiday, their bigger house or even affording to start a family, it’s a basic expectation that their job should in some way expand their lifestyle options both effective and progressively.
So what are you doing for your team to expand their personal and professional horizons?
The following list outlines suggestions that may improve your chances of attracting the right staff, keeping them, and nurturing a culture of retention.
- Deliver a high profile, strategised appraisal system that provides a detailed stairway to what team members need to achieve to advance their career through reward, recognition and promotion (and salary).
- Provide an induction pack that contains their future journey and chat about this during the interview.
- To support what needs ticking off, your HOD’s need to develop a culture of daily micro training that is included in daily team briefings.
- There needs to be a detailed SOP system.
- Create and frequently use an online testing portal to test all of your team around the fine detail of day to day job role delivery. This goes way beyond the generic statutory training during the colleagues induction.
- Use the quarterly review (20 minute coffee chat) to recognise advances and achievements in their role.
- Your Managers will need to be trained to deliver these appraisals.
- Your Managers also need their own growth curve strategy.
- Provide a competitive list of benefits and why t
If you’ve hired the right staff and these colleagues are looking for a career journey then the strategy above is proven. However, the process will not achieve 100% success if:
- You have a poor pool of staff to recruit from, but you need to hire anyway.
- You already have staff in place who are happy just as they are – not everyone wants to take on the world.
- You don’t have the management infrastructure to deliver it yet. This can take time.
- HOD’s lack the capability or interest in learning themselves.
Assuming you establish the correct people culture the following benefits are clear.
- Reduced time and cost around churn and recruitment.
- A successional planning pipeline for your management team.
- Fewer colleagues in basic training and more in advanced training.
- An enhanced guest experience.
- Enhanced on-property sales.
- A joined up culture of collaboration.
Setting up the culture.
If you’re interested in plugging a strong and effective people culture to reduce churn and retain your staff get in touch today. info@hotelgeneralmanagers.com
