Keep on holding on
How do you find the right staff—and how do you keep their skills up to date? Catri Menzies-Pike asks the experts…
The hospitality sector is booming but a skills and labour shortage is keeping many business owners up at night. There’s no question, says Mark Scanlan, who runs three Garfish restaurants in Sydney, that recruiting and retaining staff is a big challenge in a competitive labour market.
John Hart, CEO of Restaurant & Catering Australia (R&C), is taking the labour issue seriously. R&C has put together programs for employers and for potential employees to help restaurants identify their skills requirements, to find staff—and to keep them.
There are diverse groups entering the hospitality workforce, Hart says, and their needs are all different. That’s why there’s specific information about jobs and career pathways for school leavers in the Discover Hospitality program. Hart would like to see hospitality become the industry of choice for school leavers. This information about career pathways is also useful for people already in the workforce, in hospitality or elsewhere, who want to change careers.
Michael Nash (right), head chef of Garfish in Manly
A range of working arrangements under one roof is typical of the hospitality industry. There’s a real mix of contracts in Scanlan’s restaurants. Most of the chefs and key front of house staff are full-time. Some are part-timers. Kitchenhands and many of the waiting staff are casual—and “the casual labour is the labour that turns over”, Scanlan says.
Often employers need help managing these different arrangements and in finding staff on short notice. The Discover Jobs website is designed to put employers in touch with the pool of potential employees—quickly.
Brunswick Street stalwart Matteo Pignatelli has run Matteo’s for just shy of 19 years. He thinks employers need to learn how to listen to their staff to improve retention rates. “We need to think outside the box with rostering,” says Pignatelli, who’s also president of R&C Victoria. “Talking to employees about their needs and being flexible makes it easier to hold onto good staff. If someone wants to play basketball on Tuesday night, make that work—and you’ll hold onto them.”
This thinking has seen Pignatelli retain a loyal workforce and he’s paying out long-service leave to several staff.
Scanlan is reconciled to a degree of transience in his workforce. To make sure that service is consistent in the face of a changing workforce, Garfish has developed its own training and induction manuals. “Front-of-house staff go through
comprehensive training process in the first months of employment,” says Scanlan.
“We’ll sit them down and go through the way Garfish does things. We don’t want a haphazard service approach because we rely heavily on repeat business.”
Pignatelli tops up the training of his staff out of his own pocket. He’s developing a masterclass for waiters with other Melbourne restaurants. Participants will undertake a module at Matteo’s on service, as well as days at wineries and coffee roasting houses accumulating product knowledge.
The course will run for 10 weeks. Pignatelli would like to see a waiting apprenticeship developed with government support and argues the industry needs professionally trained waiters as much as it needs well-trained chefs.
There’s another level to the skills issue. Pignatelli points out that it’s cheaper to buy filleted fish at the markets and meat boned at the butcher than to do it in the kitchen. The extra food costs are made up in labour savings. It makes business sense but it also means that apprentices who’ve worked in several restaurants may not know how to bone a chicken. That smaller skill set has effects at many levels.
It’s no secret that many overseas workers are employed in the hospitality industry. Employers often need advice about how to employ overseas workers, especially when it comes to immigration and visas. Hart says R&C has worked hard to provide members with relevant information to help them meet administrative requirements and manage their staff.
Apprenticeships are also rewarding and challenging for employers. There are more than 10 apprentices at Garfish.
“They are all good, diligent and aspiring chefs,” says Scanlan. He’s confident that they will all get to the end of their training but he has seen apprentices drop out when they can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Apprenticeships are administratively complicated for employers, says Pignatelli. There’s a labyrinth of costs and tax issues to negotiate and often business owners need advice about how to manage the paperwork. To deal with problems like these, R&C has developed a mentorship scheme for apprentices and a program to help employers retain more apprentices after their first year in the industry.
Sometimes it’s a matter of working out how best to make use of available labour.
“Mums are a fantastic untapped workforce,” says Pignatelli. “Lots of restaurants are getting mums in to work during the day when the kids are at school. Younger staff do service at night. There’s no net effect on the bottom line.”
R&C has also developed a program designed to bring mothers back into the workforce, encouraging employers to consider shifts that are child-friendly.
The diversity of working arrangements, the transience of the casual workforce and complex training needs can add up to a headache for business owners. R&C has built a Skills Advisor Network that goes out and helps businesses meet their skills needs. They identify the gaps and point to recruitment and training solutions. And everyone agrees that skilling and stabilising the hospitality workforce will deliver benefits across the industry.
Source: Restaurant & Catering Magazine, 19 June 2013
