I wish you many employees

29-8-2022

It is an old Jewish saying that means something like wishing someone a lot of worries and a lot of misery but many hospitality companies are currently having a lot of worries due to the lack of employees. Of course, the best approach is to discuss with your team what you can do to make sure those who work for you are staying. We’ve come across solutions such as closing an extra day, adjusting opening hours, but also snatching staff away from other restaurants. And of course making wages more congruent with other industries. Yet there are colleagues who approach it differently, we have made a list of examples for hospitality owners who are having a hard time finding new employees.

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On-demand pay is it the solution?

We recently wrote about this in our trends we spotted week 34: in America, fast casual concept honeygrow (29 locations on the east coast) is joining forces with DailyPay to give their employees access to their earned pay after completing a shift. More details in the press release in the title link.

#inspectorLeonardo stay for free at Leonardo hotels for three months

In order to attract new staff, Leonardo Hotels decided to jettison the edged rules and procedures and create the ideal hospitality job. As a #inspectorLeonardo, you will be paid for three months to test all the hotels and F&B concepts of the hotel chain for free with a friend. Meanwhile, the new staff member of Leonardo Hotels also works along with different departments of the company, think of the kitchen, behind the bar, the marketing and finance departments. This way, the new employee gets to know all aspects of the hospitality profession, and Leonardo Hotels offers the #inspectorLeonardo a unique opportunity to discover which role within the company suits him or her best. And after those three months? After testing and enjoying, the #inspectorLeonardo is offered the perfect matching job within Leonardo Hotels.

Postillion Hotels helps employees pay off student debt

Postillion Hotels will pay 2,50 euro per hour worked to DUO for all employees with a study debt. This payment is in addition to the regular salary of the employees. With this initiative, the hotel chain hopes to remove a financial concern from their employees so that there is more room for personal growth and development. The initiative is the result of a graduation project by students of the Hotel Management School Maastricht.

Deploying robots as staff support

In mid-August, the Dutch hospitality magazine Misset already wrote an interesting article (in Dutch) about how technology can help hotels with staff shortages. To date, we only have to conclude that the technology that is affordable is not yet capable of doing much more than supporting staff in performing tasks. The first time we wrote about the use of robots was in 2014 when we spotted the first robots in service in China and nowadays there are also restaurants in the Netherlands that use similar robots. Until now we have not spotted restaurants in Europe like the American Brooklyn Dumpling Shop. We already wrote about this ‘Zero Human Interaction’ restaurant experience in July 2020 before the first branch opened in the East Village (NYC). Brooklyn Dumpling Shop is an automated dumpling restaurant and the brand is growing very fast and it is on track to open 250 locations within two years. We’ve also spotted a Robot Army: led by Taka Hirano, who heads up sushi operations, SoFi Stadium, in California, has partnered with AUTEC, the leading commercial sushi robot supplier in the country. AUTEC’s sushi robots are specially designed to deliver high quality consistency. They are used during games and events at the stadium. And for snack bars and fast food restaurants, there is hope – in America, robots such as Miso Robotics’ Flippy 2 are already being used at major chains. It’s a practical support! If you are looking for more examples, check out this link, it contains all the articles about robots.

Commit to training own employees

We wrote about the Yum! Center for Global Franchise Excellence at Taco Bell. This training was initiated with the concept that it would be beneficial if the higher-level employees in the Taco Bell chain reflected the people who eat and work there. In an effort to break down potential barriers and further diversify the franchise system, Taco Bell launched this Taco Bell Business School in January 2022 in partnership with the University of Louisville. A unique franchise training program to develop both restaurant leaders and entrepreneurs and break down barriers to franchise ownership.

We have also seen a few examples in the Netherlands of in-house training such as the Ron Blaauw college, where you learn the trade of basic chef in 13 weeks. But smaller organizations also offer courses, such as the Mama Gaia Academy. This academy was launched in June 2022 and says participants will be prepared for a hospitality job in just six weeks. In this way, this academy aims to address the staffing shortage in the hospitality industry. In a short online training program, people with little to no experience are trained for a job in the kitchen or service. The English-language program is easily accessible; participants can watch short informative videos via their smartphones at a preferred time during the day. To accelerate the transition to more plant-based options in the hospitality industry, vegan cuisine is the focus of all modules. The Academy was created by the founder of social enterprise Dopper, known for the refillable water bottle that reduces the use of single-use plastic. Gulpener and others contribute to making the course possible.

I wish you many employees | A few more examples.

Misset wrote an interesting article about this, with examples such as the blurring of the lines between the ‘black and white’ brigade, allowing the chefs to support the servers. But also about job fairs, offering tattoos and so on. We like to complement this with the examples we wrote about. Like being able to lease a Van Moof bike when you start working at the Double Tree by Hilton near Amsterdam Central Station.

Loetje Reeuwijk recently opened and was looking for staff in the period before, they offered you a permanent contract and you are every other week a weekend off. Furthermore, employees receive between €250,- and €1000,- bonus if they bring in a friend who also comes to work at Loetje.

Fletcher Hotels also gave a summer bonus, they foresaw a great and therefore extremely busy year in March 2022 and reserved 3.5 million for hotel staff. “Both the spring and summer periods are going to be very busy in the hotels and restaurants. It is important that we retain our people. Therefore, everyone who is employed after the summer will receive a summer bonus.” In addition, with their internal temporary employment agency, known as FletcherGIG, they are betting on retaining staff by paying them more and offering more flexibility. More details in the article, link in the title.

Hutten and Sign Language Coffee Bar entered into an exclusive partnership to recruit more “Gestureistas” in April this year. The Sign Language Coffee Bar employs baristas with a hearing impairment. The collaboration fits perfectly with Hutten’s policy to provide a workplace for people with a distance to the labor market. Are you deaf or hard of hearing, sign language adept and would you like to work as a “Gestureista”? Please contact them or take a look at their vacancies.

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