Staff retention is critical to the success of bars and restaurants. A consistent staff will help deliver a consistent experience for guests. Beyond that, staff consistency improves your relationship with your community. If your guests know you want to be there, they will enjoy their dining experience. If you want to mitigate staff turnover, here are a few tips.
Preempt The Problem
It’s no secret that restaurant work is a challenging profession. Ask any employee in the industry, and undoubtedly, they’ll have a stack of horror stories about past jobs to tell. If you want to keep them on board, your best chance lies in ensuring your professional relationship doesn’t qualify for any of these stories in the future.
The unfortunate truth of this element is that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to creating favorable working conditions for your employees. Each position in the restaurant is going to qualify a “positive experience” differently. For cooks, you’re best served by hiring an effective prep team outside of service hours. Giving them ample tools that they need to succeed during a night of service is the best way to make their jobs easy even during the busiest of service days.
Some solutions, though, do cross positions in making everyone’s job more approachable. Take designing a menu, for example – if you create a relatively simple menu, you’re helping both your cooks and your service staff. The limited number of dishes means both positions will have less to think about. Cooks will need less prep work in advance, and servers will need to remember less in terms of allergens and menu descriptions.
Create a User-Friendly Experience
One of the easiest ways to mitigate stress for your workers is to prioritize the guest experience. This might not follow logically, but think of it from the perspective of your workers: If the guests understand the experience with perfect fluidity, their job becomes that much easier. To that end, consider clarity in the guest's perception of the dining experience.
Menu design, as mentioned above, is an enormously useful tool. If you design your menu to indicate the correct steps of service, your guests won’t feel lost when approaching a meal at your restaurant. When reading your menu, consider adding signifiers denoting common allergens! Certainly, your servers should know the details of things like allergens but providing that information to your guests only mitigates the number of questions as guests formulate their experience. Try to create similar transparency and ease of use in other facets of your experience. If redesigning your menu seems daunting, don’t panic. Take some time to figure out your needs and find a template that fits those needs.
There are other things you can do to the end of making your experience user-friendly – make sure you have fixed parking solutions for your guests, that reservations (if applicable) are easy to pursue, and that you have a website with plenty of information available.
Focus on Your Staff
In addition to preempting common problems, try cultivating an environment your staff wants to work in. Your staff is comprised of people with lives outside of work, and life can get messy. Maintain a consistent flow of communication with them about obstacles that might hamper their ability to be at work. Sometimes, problems come at the last minute – childcare solutions fall through, or friends and family need the attention of your employees. These things aren’t their fault. Further, they’re positive things in some ways; it can be good to see how loyal and dedicated your staff are to their obligations.
Try and be understanding when the worst happens. Even more so, if you can offer support or solutions to them in some way, pursue that. Showing your employees that you want them specifically to work for you is a great way to deepen your relationship with them.
Don’t feel limited to assisting in emergencies, either. If you have the chance to build your staff up and assist their professional growth, see what you can do. Are there additional professional certifications or training they have an interest in? Do they want to take on more responsibility? If they’re looking to grow as professionals, by all means, do not stand in the way of that growth. If one of your servers wants to pursue a sommelier certification, see if you can arrange some sort of incentive! Perhaps, for instance, the business could partially reimburse them for their training upon receipt of course completion. There are lots of ways to enrich and bring together your employees, and pursuit of these will help you keep a tightly-knit team.
Cover The Basics First
There’s no reason to sugarcoat this final and critical point: Your employees work with you because they need a job to support themselves and potentially others. Offer a competitive rate of starting pay that respects the cost of living in your area. If you can offer benefits like health insurance, do so. If you can consider things like maternity/paternity leave, follow up on them. These concepts are fairly unusual in the restaurant industry, but for those who have them, they can be an absolute game-changer.
At the end of the day, your employees know that they are just that – employees. Providing for the basic needs they’re pursuing in a job only raises your reputation in their eyes. There’s really no stronger arrow in your quiver for mitigating employee turnover than by simply making your business one of the best jobs available to them. Offering benefits and higher pay can make employers squeamish, to be sure. But remember: your employees are an investment. The more you put into them, the better they’re going to be able to do for your business itself.
Ultimately, it’s not hard to avoid employee turnover. Make being a good place to work and being a good boss your priority just as much as providing great food or atmosphere, and watch how you’re rewarded. If you emphasize the value of your staff from day one and mean it, your employees won’t need to be convinced. They’ll be the ones doing the convincing, and they’ll keep your business running for years to come.
Megan Prevost is a marketing content writer for MustHaveMenus. Her work has appeared in App Institute, FanSided, FSR, Modern Restaurant Management, PMQ, RestoBiz, Small Business Currents, and The Daily Fandom.
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