Tackling the post-Covid skills and staff shortage

One of the lasting legacies of Covid is the staff and skills shortage which has cut a swathe through the ranks of workers across the hospitality sector. With many businesses struggling to adapt to the ‘new normal’, industry veterans have been working to come up with strategies with which to combat this unprecedented shortfall. Tourism Training Australia, the national industry training association, held a crisis summit earlier this year, and we asked several of the speakers to share their thoughts – Tourism Training Australia Chair John Hart OAM; Steve Sidd, Managing Director of Catering HQ; and Amanda Fuller, Group Executive Chef for the Sam Prince Group.

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“There’s a lot more to be done”

John Hart emphasizes that the recent Federal Government Job Summit has brought some outcomes which will be helpful for the hospitality industry in combating staff shortages in the short term: “Particularly the amount of allocation to the Department of Home Affairs to accelerate visa processing – that will impact on not only skilled migration but also unskilled, such as working holidaymakers and the like, which will bring more people to the country more quickly. The upgrading of the number of training places will also flow through immediately. There are many things that will impact in the short term, but will they be enough to solve our prevailing skills shortage? I would say not – we estimate there’s about 167,000 vacancies currently in travel, tourism and hospitality and those vacancy numbers are not coming off at all, we’re just managing to keep up with natural attrition, so there’s a lot more to be done.”

Looking towards the expected ramping up of demand for dining out that is typical as we enter the festive season, John acknowledges “it’s going to be very difficult. Aside from the fact that the usual end of year cycle coincides with school leavers who are looking for work coming into the market; that will fill some of the gap, but we have to make sure we’ve got workers coming in from offshore particularly in the semi-skilled occupations and also skilled occupations – we’ve still got lag times for skilled visas. The advantage we have is that our peak season is counter-cyclical to the rest of the world, so as the European summer comes off we’ll start to be a more attractive destination particularly to working holidaymakers looking to come from Europe to a warmer climate, and we’ll start to see a greater interest in Australia. The challenge is going to be making sure we’ve got airline seats at a reasonable price to be bringing in those skilled and semi-skilled workers.

Apart from filling in gaps through workers from overseas, clearly more needs to be done to make the industry more attractive as a real career option, as John concurs: “There’s absolutely no doubt we need to make the industry more attractive to locals, and we need to have Australians filling jobs in Australia. The challenge is there are a number of parts of our overall workforce that are in shortage and there’s huge competition locally for a relatively small number of people. If you look at the amount of people on welfare the current case load shows a total availability of around 280,000 people ready to work today, and as I mentioned we’ve got 167,000 vacancies just in tourism and hospitality. So there are a very large number of vacancies across the entire workforce and not terribly many Australian workers to go around.

“Certainly we need to look at improving our training regime, improving the perception of the industry from a career point of view – we need to do all of those things to attract locals, but even if we do all that and we do it in a way that is the most successful it can be, we’re still going to need offshore labour to have our industry functioning at its full potential.”

John emphasises that competitive pay rates are not the issue here: “If you look at the average wages across the industry at the levels of jobs we’re looking to fill, they are comparable with what’s happening across other industries, so it’s really not an issue of money. We’re now seeing increases in average rates of pay and that’s making our occupations even more competitive financially with others. It’s more an issue of the hours we’re working, the location of venues, the incompatibility at times between where we have jobs available and where people are looking for work; it’s all of those things in terms of having a workforce that’s available with the right skills, at the right time, in the right place. And we have to make sure we can make the industry more attractive, even given those things.”

“Everyone knows the industry’s suffering”

In his capacity as managing director of Catering HQ which runs the food offerings in eight clubs throughout Sydney, Steve Sidd has extensive expertise in workforce planning and management and is committed to staff training. He says Catering HQ’s HR division has been continuously recruiting post-COVID, but that “trying to find staff is really difficult across the board right now – everyone knows the industry’s suffering.”

“Everyone’s pushing to find solutions to the staffing and skills shortage from all angles. It’s a hot topic with Restaurant & Catering Australia, a lot of the other industry associations are also working hard to come up with strategies. I myself am speaking at lots of expos and seminars about the ways our business has tried to tackle it – I’m speaking at Foodservice Australia this month. We’re all banging on about the same thing and stamping our feet.”

Steve points out there are two aspects to the issue – the shortage of staff, which is a recruitment problem, and the shortage of skills which is a training and education problem. “We employ 350 staff across the club venues we service and right now but we’re still short by 120. Our strategy has been to change our approach so we become more of an employer of choice – to that end we’ve put quite a few initiatives in place to get more people on board. Starting with paying for relocation costs for staff – if we need people in regional areas we pay for their accommodation, we pay for transport for staff if we need to relocate people from one venue to another. Those are short term strategies. We've also implemented referral fees – for anyone who refers a family member or friend to come work with us they get a $100 gift card.

“We’ve also instituted succession planning and profit sharing for those in leadership teams ie managers, supervisors, head chefs and sous chefs. Once they’ve been with us for 12 months and as long as they meet their KPIs in terms of customer service and performance standards, they get some profit share and become part of the share plan of that venue. People see that as a progression, it pushes them to work and strive harder and grow in the business, and it helps us retain staff as well. We’ve also aligned with Commbank who are offering any of our staff free financial advice for example with home loans. We’re tackling every avenue we can to be that preferred employer of choice and that’s what we’re pushing to industry collectively, to get on board. Because we know that coming to Christmas, a lot of venues won’t have sufficient staff to be able to open their doors.”

Steve says efforts to recruit more staff online have proven ineffective: “We’ve spent $70,000 on Seek alone this year; we’ve advertised on Gumtree, Barcats, Indeed, you name it, every possible avenue and we either just don’t get the applications, or when you do get them people turn up for the interview, get a contract offer and then seek a counter offer from their existing employer or another prospective employer. So they’re bartering employers off against each other. We’re seeing baristas who want $85,000 a year to make coffees at the moment … it’s nuts.”

He argues this shortage is specific to foodservice rather than across the board. “When we put up ads for foodservice staff we get barely any applications, but when we put up an ad in for a nine to five weekday admin role we get inundated with responses.  

“I think people have lost the appetite to work in hospitality – they don’t want to do shift work, they don’t want to work nights or weekends, they don’t want the long hours. The whole attitude has changed since Covid and people have just exited the industry. Consequently the salaries we’re paying now are way above and beyond what we used to pay, just to get people, and that’s why all these incentives are needed to bring more staff on board.”

A role for Government to play

Catering HQ has now engaged a recruiter and immigration agent and is currently sponsoring around 45 people from overseas to come to Australia. “We’ve got people from Kathmandu, Nepal, Dubai, at all different levels from restaurant managers, head chefs and sous chefs. We’ve had about 10 enter the country so far and they’re coming in with great skillsets, from large hotel operations. Given we were spending all this money on advertising and not getting much traction, we’re better off doing it this way because even though we have to pay for four-year visas, it’s worth the investment. We’re currently working with Government to try to push them through faster, it’s traditionally been a 12 week turnaround and we’re trying to get it down to four weeks. And whatever Government can do in terms of support and getting these visas across the line faster will be a huge help to us.”

Steve believes there is a role for Government to play in funding, such as traineeships for people who don’t have the relevant skillsets. “I’ve been in conversations recently pushing for micro-credentialed courses for upskilling people in RSA, RCG, food handling, commercial cookery certificate 2, 3 or 4 – making the courses quite short and snappy to get people who don’t have the experience to be upskilled to a point where they can come and work for us. Aged employees is another area – if we could get some funding for people over 50 to come in and work, rather than just getting school leavers or uni students, because we need more mature staff as well.

“We've gone online with our staff inductions, basic training courses, customer service 101 – we’re trying to push the training as hard as we can. As I said, we’re fortunate we’ve got the 350 staff we have, we’re not desperate, our staff are working extra hours and happy to be paid for it, but my concern is how long can they sustain it before they burn out? Eventually something’s gonna give and the efficiency and quality will inevitably diminish.”

“The drought we’re faced with is unprecedented”

As Group Executive Chef at Sam Prince Hospitality Group, Amanda Fuller is responsible for staff at six restaurants – four in Sydney and two in Melbourne. She says that while it’s always been challenging to find staff, “the drought we’re faced with right now is unprecedented”:

“You put an ad up and you might get two applicants, one of whom’s from overseas – there are just no candidates coming through. That encourages people to offer higher wages, but the risk there is we’ll end up hurting each other by creating a culture of overpaying people. That leads to people coming in who have little experience but a different perception of their own value, which is a problem in itself. I believe you need to set people up for success, but if they’re walking in with a mindset that they’re at a significant different level to what they actually are, it’s not doing them any favours.”

“Our priority is to make staff feel valued”

Like Catering HQ, Sam Prince is focusing on development and progression plans. “Even before the current staffing shortages, we’ve always been big on promoting from within and we’re continuing to do so – our feeling is if we can’t find people externally then we have to grow our own. Now more than ever it’s a good thing to do – we offer a progression program for development and we financially reward people as and when they hit certain milestones.

“We’ve also been asking staff to recommend friends for positions, via referral bonuses – when they do that, there’s an implicit recommendation that they’re enjoying working for us and so they’re encouraging their friends to take up a role with us too. As part of retention of existing staff, we’re supporting working parents with childcare, we’re reimbursing staff for phones, we’re offering discounts at our businesses. We’re also offering flexible working conditions, so some people can start later or finish earlier. We pay slightly above award and of course there are tips involved too.

“We’re also paying for people to do extra development education, up to a certain figure, because we understand it will help them to perform better. We offer gym memberships, we celebrate anniversaries – our priority is to make staff feel valued, and it’s important to acknowledge both front of house and back of house staff for each venue.”

Amanda stresses how important it is for workplaces to invest in people: “When we’ve had issues hiring chefs de partie, we have hired people who are less skilled, almost kitchenhands, and given them to a qualified chef de partie as an assistant. That helps the chef de partie do a larger volume of meals and at the same time it helps upskill the kitchenhand who learns from working alongside them.”

She is also passionate about encouraging more school students to enter the industry. “When I think back to my time at school, my hospitality teacher also taught woodwork and sewing; she taught hospitality but she wasn’t really passionate about it. Given there’s a lot of talk about teacher shortages, I think we need to have more hospitality professionals teaching at schools, certainly in years 11 and 12. Hospitality students need to be given a good start, the seed needs to be planted early. If we had professionals from the industry teaching kids then they could big up the industry more – I certainly don’t remember my teacher talking about the potential to work overseas or the versatility of a possible hospitality career. 

“I do think we should be instilling in our school students that hospitality is a great career to get into and showcasing some of the skills you actually learn by working in it. And I think this needs to be done at schools, not in TAFES because there aren’t sufficient numbers of apprentices coming through TAFE. That of course is troubling in itself – I mean, I don’t have any apprentices on my books at the moment, though I’d love to, not one. So I think schools are the key.”

She also argues mature age students are “pretty much a thing of the past” when it comes to hospitality – “Especially with Covid, they’ve seen all those people leave the industry, so they don’t see it as something to go into. But there’s nothing better than a keen kid who wants to work in a business because they think it’s a cool place to be and they can see where it might take them. I’ve worked in London, at Ayers Rock – hospitality can take you to some cool places, and we need to focus on that. We need to get more trained professionals into high schools, whether they’re ex-industry who quit during Covid or whether they’re still working in hospitality and just want to take one day out of their week to teach and relieve the pressure from teachers. They are the real deal and they can sell the dream to our youth about a hospitality career and where it can take you. Honestly, once you’ve led a brigade of chefs it really does equip you for a whole range of jobs.”