Your staff are and always should be the heart of your hospitality business, without them, you wouldn’t have a business. Especially currently, staff retention within hospitality is incredibly high so throughout this article you will learn not only how to build a harmonious team with but in the long run lower your staff retention.
Caring for and developing your team results in a happy and powerful workforce that will want to stay with your business for longer.
Team building exercises.
Your employees are a team, and your respect is highly important to them but similarly it’s important that they respect each other. This team will be working together day in and day out so if they don’t get along or there is the smallest amount of tension, things wont run as smoothly.
Team building exercises can vary greatly, you could all going out for a meal to learn about each other outside of work pressures, or you could have team meetings with ice breakers or fun games for the team to compete together. This will help them build the strong relationship that will be required when they are working together on a busy shift. Let them learn each other’s strengths and weaknesses and build on these together.
If any tensions or arguments arise its your duty to ensure that these issues are ironed out before they leave so that when they arrive to work the following day all previous tensions are gone ready for a new day.
Understand their needs
It's known that as a restaurant you understand what you need to run a successful business. Your employees themselves have their own personal needs that need to be listened to and respected. Whether that means one of your employees has classes every Tuesday and Thursday, or the other employee who must look after their children on the weekend, there are so many possibilities but it's your job as a manager to adhere to these needs.
If you continuously rota your staff on for shifts, they can't do not only will you leave yourself short staffed but will also annoy these staff members and make them feel like a burden for the continuous reminder.
We at Opsyte has seen this potential issue first hand and want to give you the correct tools for preventing the above. Opsyte have a function called “non-working days” which can be set up in the employees’ profile, where you simply select the day that they have a continuous need to be out of work and then that day will then be greyed out on your rota, saving you from trying to remember every employee's schedule.
Show your appreciation
It's very easy for hospitality staff to become burnt out, it's not an easy job. Something so simple as buying the staff a few £4 boxes of chocolates on a busy Saturday night won’t break the bank but it will show your employees your appreciation of them and their hard work.
Going back even simpler than that, make sure you say thank you to them after every shift, make sure you offer them a drink of water or a hot drink, sadly small gestures like this aren’t done enough but it’s incredibly important to your employees to know that they are appreciated in the workplace.
A nice little touch is to hone into their personal lives by getting them cards for the anniversary or with Opsyte’s ‘upcoming birthdays’ feature you can always be sure you won’t miss getting them a birthday card.
Get insights at staff level
Truth be told, even as a manager, you may not know how the staff themselves are feeling. Especially on days where you are potentially working in another site or simply your day off.
Of course, you can ask all your employees how they are feeling in regards to work but, firstly, you may not get a true response, when employees have to answer directly to the manager they may lie and soften things to make them appear better. Secondly, if you have 30+ staff, this would take a hefty amount of time away from your already busy schedule.
With Opsyte’s clocking in and out feature, all employees are presented with 5 sets of questions, selected by you, the manager, for them to anonymously inputting their answers. The beauty of this feature is that you will receive answers every day for you to track on your dashboard and your employees will feel heard as you are asking for their input every day.
Manage Correctly
Now you have focused on your staffs well being. Its time you manage this all correctly. This includes ensuring their hours are correct, ensuring they accrue and take the correct amount of holiday and even tronc. All these are basic necessities to get correct however can be easy to get wrong, when they are wrong is when staff will leave. Opsyte helps bring simplicity to these tasks.
Opsyte gives you the ability to take control and efficiently mange all of the above and more. Our software is for hospitality, built by hospitality experts, so you can be assured its the right software for your businesses and coherently staff retention.
If you are interested in learning more about Opsyte please get in contact via [email protected]
