INSIDE FOODSERVICE: Foodservice sector strategises to tackle staff and skills shortages

/ The Armory/

With the foodservice staff and skills shortage showing little sign of abating, we speak to three well known foodservice advocates to find out what strategies are being employed to ensure staff retention, what role government can play and the outlook for the broader hospitality sector.

LISTEN: How to retain good staff in today’s market

“We have to make hospitality attractive again”

MARKUS WERNER

As National Executive Chef for major catering company Delaware North, Markus Werner has experienced firsthand the staffing and skills shift exacerbated by the onslaught of Covid back in 2019, and the consequent fallout for the industry. “Once we started up again post-lockdown, everyone knew it was going to be an absolute disaster so we had a lot of hard sessions, with everybody sitting together and saying, what do we have to do to get and retain staff, and really make it attractive for people to come back to this industry?

“And I think all of us came to the solution that you can’t try to do the same thing we did four or five years ago and hope it will work. Instead we have to change, we have to understand that Generation X and so on is different than how we started out. We were all sitting back and saying, OK, my kid won’t come here to work because of this, this, this - so we have to change, we have to make hospitality attractive again, sexy again so people want to do this, and not just for one weekend because they couldn’t find another job, but really have it as a lifestyle choice. And we did.”

“The key is for us as managers in foodservice is to ask ourselves, what is important for our people?”

Markus says the key for foodservice employers wanting to retain staff is to look outside the box. “Certainly some salaries went up, but that happened in every industry, so you could now actually support a family if you were a senior chef or front of house person. But the flipside of that is, if you can get good people in those roles, that then attracts good casual staff and other good people.  

“The key is for us as managers in foodservice is to ask ourselves, what is important for our people? They need some time off, they need work/life balance, they need certain perks. For example, we now provide uniforms for all our chefs, so they no longer need to buy them themselves. We also make sure we feed them and they get a great choice of food.

“These sorts of changes had to come. When I was young, cash was king and it was all about hours - people would work 30 hours but this is not the case anymore. Today we have much more flexibility. so if someone says they don’t want to work Sunday or Monday we need to respect it – not be so narrow as in the past.”

Markus says Delaware North has invested in improving its shift scheduling via software upgrades. “We have a regular core of chefs and front of house people, but then we have more through the peak season. In total we have 6000 people on our books, so your regular core people will get first pick on the shifts offered and if they don’t accept in 24 to 48 hours then we open it up in a process we call shift bidding. So those shift opportunities go out to all and whoever responds first takes the shift.

“If someone says they don’t want to work Sunday or Monday we need to respect it – not be so narrow”

“It makes the market really competitive and the great thing for those workers is they get the opportunity to work across all our sites. They might get the chance to work in a really premium restaurant when shift bidding is on, and if they perform well and the chef likes them, they’ll get the chance for more shifts there and the opportunity to be a core staff member in a premium venue. So a worker might work in the MCG on Monday, in Marvel Stadium on Tuesday, then at the airport across multiple venues later in the week. And this helps us a lot because it means staff don’t need to look outside of our organisation for work.”

It was also important to address the length of the shifts, because, as Markus says, “you don’t want anyone working 12 to 15 hours anymore, those days are over; and on the other hand people don’t want to work just a short shift of two hours. So we have overlapped the setup crew and service crew a little bit in order that everyone gets a good healthy length for their shift.

“The way I look at it is: would I be happy if my 25 year old child works here? If no, I wouldn’t offer it to somebody else. So there’s no split shifts anymore unless there is a need because of illness; otherwise it’s straightforward, clean shifts, provide uniforms, give really clear communication, and don’t expect anything from anyone you wouldn’t do yourself.”

“Would I be happy if my 25 year old child works here? If no, I wouldn’t offer it to somebody else”

Markus emphasises the need to make foodservice work attractive “if we really want to be seen as a workplace of choice. Some people may want to have every Tuesday off to go to their tennis lesson, or to the gym, or they may run a small business on the side - whatever it is, we need to fit with their lifestyle.”

He adds investment in training and providing career paths is imperative for major foodservice employers. “At Delaware North we’re now starting up our own apprentice program - we have trainers and we're just at the beginning, we’ll soon be launching a  much bigger leadership training program. It’s important that people who want a career in hospitality can see a path for their future.

“We’ve also increased staffing numbers, tripling our fulltime staff across pretty much all our venues to ensure better consistency. And we’ve found we’ve been able to attract very high quality people - we have chefs here who worked in Noma restaurant, which is number one in the world, because here they have a work/life balance.”

Employers “looking for ways to engage staff”

JOHN HART

John Hart, Executive Chair of the Australian Chamber of Tourism and former Chief Executive of Restaurant and Catering Australia, says hospitality employers are highly conscious of what he describes as “the war for talent” and “they’re looking for ways to engage staff like never before”. 

“We’re seeing changed up working weeks, changed up hours, leave arrangements that are creative,” John says. “At the top end, equity shares are being offered to attract and retain staff – there’s all manner of options that are driving deeper engagements with the team and making sure employers are getting not just that initial attraction but also retention.”

But all that good practice by individual employers unfortunately doesn’t mean the industry as a whole is attracting more people. “We’re about 200,000 people shy of where we were 12 months ago, and not managing to keep up with other industries in our overall attraction,” John confirms.

“If you want a promotion, nine times out of ten you’re going to have to move to another business in order to get it”

This is often blamed on the working hours dictated by the nature of foodservice, as John acknowledges: “Naturally it would be much easier to attract people if all of our consumers managed to pack their dining into a nine to five working day, but that’s never going to happen.

“Instead we need to focus on ways of attracting people into an industry that’s inherently different in the way we service our customers.”

And while big employers like Delaware North are able to offer structured career paths, this is not an option for most small to midrange foodservice businesses. “As an industry predominantly made up of lots of smaller businesses, our potential to offer career transition is really pretty limited,” John points out.

“If you’re working in the hospitality industry and you want a promotion, nine times out of ten you’re going to have to move to another business in order to get it. So we need to promote the opportunity to get career paths through different businesses across the length and breadth of the industry. That’s a challenge in itself.

“Then we have the further challenge of seasonality and the fact that we need to attract casual staffing pools to be able to deal with the peaks and troughs in demand. Most of these are not only through days of the week, they’re not only through weeks of the month but they’re through months of the year and there’s a lot of different high and low points that we’ve got to traverse with our staffing teams.

“It’s really very difficult for the smaller operator to overcome these challenges because they have flat organisational structures - essentially you’ve got the owner of the business and a very small team. What we need to do is have employees and those working in those smaller businesses consider careers through the industry, not just through the business, and we need to have businesses working together to be able to offer those sort of transitions.

“What we need to do is have employees ... consider careers through the industry, not just through the business”

“The transition that happens most often, but doesn’t necessarily get much attention, is when somebody goes from working in a small foodservice business to buying their own – and that is a career path in itself.”

John says the Federal Government is stepping up to assist the industry: “At the moment the Government is funding the development of a resource that will track and promote careers via a central hub for staff recruitment and training across the whole tourism and hospitality sector.

“That’s a really big initiative that’s never been done on this scale before, and it’s a really good role for government to play. There has been a lot of industry involvement in its development and I would by the time we hit the end of the year we’ll have a prototype the industry can see.”

“We certainly suffer from being firstly the highest minimum wage country in the world, and secondly the most regulated labour market in the world”

As to whether hospitality wages need to increase further, John says “The reality is that they can’t, given the limited capacity of hospitality businesses to pay more. Those businesses can only pay the proportion of revenue that is being earnt which still allows them to stay in business. In other words, there’s a cap on the amount they can pay.  

“Our industry is pretty comparable with others in terms of hourly rates and wages being paid across the sector. We certainly suffer from being firstly the highest minimum wage country in the world, and secondly the most regulated labour market in the world. If we were able to get a more flexible working arrangements, particularly with regard to rolling up hours of the week so we’re not having to pay these huge additional rates on weekends, that would really help. But in the current environment that’s a long way off.”

“It’s like we’ve lost a generation”

Tony Twitchett

Tony Twitchett, General Manager and part owner of Transport Hotel, Taxi Kitchen and Transit Rooftop Bar, says staffing was the number one challenge post-Covid, especially in the Melbourne CBD where his businesses are located.

“We were hit pretty hard, but having said that, we’ve been able to attract some good people who have stayed and are sticking by us, which is very good. In terms of skillsets, it’s like we’ve lost a generation – the skill level of people coming in before Covid was much higher; we’re now finding people coming in with less skill or even no skill, no hospitality experience, and we’re teaching them everything from the ground up.”

Tony says he’s achieved staff retention simply through his regular business practices to incentivise his team, which he’s followed for many years. “I invest in them, not just with good pay, obviously, but with knowledge, whether it’s about food, about process, about cooking techniques.

“We’ve had butchers come in to the restaurant to show how to break down a whole pig, we’ve taken the entire kitchen crew on a boat trip to a mussel farm at Port Arlington, we’ve done a cheesemaking class, we’ve done a field trip to an egg farm, and after every Saturday night service we all go to Chinatown for a late night feed. We try to create a safe and positive working environment and we find that people gravitate to that and excel within it.

“We also maintain a good work/life balance – one of the biggest things to come out of Covid was the recognition that people don’t want to work the 70 hours a week I was used to, and that’s good, because they’re now a lot fresher for the whole week.”

One thing Tony has found with regard to new staff coming in is that their expectations are occasionally a little unrealistic, especially when it comes to job titles.

“I invest in them, not just with good pay, obviously, but with knowledge”

“I think for a lot of chefs, we all think we’re better than we are – I’ve seen people who’ve had less time in the industry, and they come in and apply for a sous chef role. As it becomes clear in the interview that they have knowledge gaps, and also when they explain how they conduct themselves in the kitchen, I think to myself I would rather take them on as a chef de partie and give them an opportunity to familiarise themselves with each section, so they can become confident enough in the kitchen before they work themselves up to sous chef level.”

With regard to rising pay rates, Tony says “I think they’re finally catching up to where they should be. It was getting quite inflated over Covid and coming out of Covid, but it has balanced out now. I think we’re now paying the right amount of money for the role people are doing.

“Hospitality is a great industry in that we can be very flexible with our working hours – we run our business seven days a week so we can offer weekends on different days. The hours are not what they were – our young chefs here are on 40 hours a week, whereas I was on 70 when I did my apprenticeship – and with that and the work/life balance we offer, I think hospitality is a pretty attractive proposition. It’s just that more people don’t know about it yet. 

“The businesses like ours which are always running are the ones which retain staff because they have the fun of producing food from nothing and creating dishes for people to enjoy – we’ve got a team of 15, a great working environment, and we really strive to give people what they want.”