Restaurant employee turnover… Sadly, those are three words the industry is all too familiar with. In three surveys conducted recently, restaurant staffing issues as well as the high turnover rate in the industry were the main focus:
- In the Bureau of Labor Statistics report, they found that the turnover rate in the hospitality industry had risen to 72.1% in 2015 (up from 66.7% the year before).
- Bruce Grindy, chief economist of the National Restaurant Association, pointed to one specific finding from the report that he wants restaurants to pay close attention to. He believes that the 50.3% quit rate in the industry demonstrates that “workers are increasingly confident in the labor market and are willing to move to another job [if unhappy where they are].”
- In restaurant analytics firm TDn2K’s survey, 74% of restaurant management said they were either “very concerned” or “extremely concerned” with recruitment.
- In the Nation’s Restaurant News Operator Survey, half of the respondents indicated that finding new (and quality) talent was their biggest problem at the moment.
Regardless of whether your restaurant falls in line with any of these statistics—from the general amount of concern to those actually suffering from high quit and turnover rates—it’s time to get moving on a solution.
The High Cost of Restaurant Employee Turnover
The cost of employee turnover is high. If you stop to think about it, the costs go way beyond just the salary you pay your staff. There is also the time and money spent on:
- Advertising a new position
- Reviewing and sorting through resumes
- Interviewing eligible candidates
- Onboarding the new hire
- Training the new hire on your restaurant, systems, and processes (which also takes time away from the rest of the team involved)
- Educating the employee on an ongoing basis
- De-boarding the employee when they quit or you let them go
And on and on the process goes if you’re not bringing on the right people the first time. That is a lot of time taken away from managers who should be running the floor, the waitstaff who should be focusing on delivering great customer service, and the rest of the team who should be focusing on the positive workplace around them and not on the latest firing/hiring.
Of course, you can’t mitigate for every possible reason an employee may leave, but lining up a proper training system is a good way to ensure you’re doing everything you can to keep the good ones around.
The ROI of a Digital Training Management System
We recently discussed 10 Server Interview Questions You Need to Include in Your Process. Why? Because filtering out less-than-serious applicants or people whose values don’t align with your brand will give you a leg-up on hiring the right people the first time around. Once you’ve got those winning applicants on your team, it’s then your responsibility to make sure they get all the training and support they need. A digital training management system is the best way to accomplish this.
In-person and on-the-job training will never totally be replaced by a digital training process; the knowledge new team members can gain from more seasoned veterans is invaluable. However, digital training is a great supplementary tool that every restaurant should be using since it’s:
- cost-effective,
- easy to access since everything is online and accessible by any device type,
- extremely time and resource efficient,
- appealing to a newer generation of workers who yearn for videos and images and a way to self-manage,
- allowing you to spend more time on supporting your staff,
- and giving your team more visibility into ways they can grow in their position as well as within your company.
Your team needs to know that you value their time and efforts and that you’re not just setting them up to be another cog in the system. By adding a digital training management system like the Better Chains’ Learning Center module to your process, you are effectively showing your team how much you believe in them as well as in your overall brand by setting everyone up for continued success.
