Improve Restaurant Employee Retention

Assemble An All-Star Team

While sometimes you might feel desperate to fill positions, staffing your restaurant with “any warm body” is a mistake. The wrong candidate can spread chaos in your restaurant, making everything more difficult.

​It takes time and patience to find and develop restaurant employees that will become valuable team members. Respect the effort you’re putting toward training and skills development. Make sure they appreciate that and embrace their own opportunity for growth.

If you bring in trouble-makers or those who drag your team down it can actually make things worse than being understaffed. A small team that works well together can often accomplish more than if they have to pick up someone else’s slack.

Retaining toxic personalities on your restaurant team can drive away new staff. Consider this even if they are long-term employees. Don’t let their personal issues destroy the work environment for others.

Always be Hiring

Stay on the lookout and actively recruit new employees.​ Learn to look for the spark in someone that shows the initiative and a positive work ethic. Even if you are fully staffed at present you never know when an opening will appear. It’s good to have a backlog of new team members you can call in.

Ask potential candidates what their short and long term goals are.​ Determine if they are in alignment with your needs. If they tell you they are looking for summer work consider the amount of effort it will take to train them and find a replacement when they leave.

Open a career path for staff so they can become the next generation of chefs, servers, and managers. Encourage them to push their skills and take on more responsibility. When employees are invested you’ll get better work and a higher rate of retention.

Conduct an Exit Poll

When your staff members move on, find out why. If you are serious about improving restaurant employee retention address the reasons they are leaving.

• Lack of opportunity
• Schedule conflicts
• Not enough hours
• Personality clashes

It’s important not to be defensive and to just listen.

Understand what motivates employees to leave so that you can adapt. You may be surprised what you learn.

The Sunk Costs of Turnover

Since restaurant labor is one of your highest business costs it might be hard to consider raising employee pay. But to attract the best talent and retain employees your offer must be competitive.

Remember that there are increased costs associated with high employee turnover. The investment you’ve made in hiring, training and developing valuable team members cannot be so easily replaced. And the potential for a degraded guest experience increases as more inexperienced staff are introduced into the restaurant.

If You Don’t Someone Else Will

To determine what is fair compensation for your employees look at the pay offered by other businesses employing people with the skills and traits for which you’re recruiting.

It’s not just the restaurant industry who’s vying for your workers. Market-matched compensation lowers your restaurant staff turnover by keeping them from wandering away in search of better opportunities.

Provide Growth Opportunities

Restaurant employee retention is accomplished by showing your staff that they have a good reason to stick around. When employees show teamwork, leadership and initiative make sure they know they have opportunities for career growth.

Rewarding them with even a small bump in pay can reinforce positive contributions and make them feel appreciated. Stoking a sense of loyalty in your staff is key to increasing retention.

Develop a Roadmap to Success

The restaurant is a complicated place with a lot going on. For new employees this can be overwhelming, especially if they haven’t worked in a restaurant before. This is why having well developed processes and procedures is incredibly important.

By providing new employees with clear expectations and a pre-made path to achieve success it will put them at ease. Throwing a new recruit into a chaotic “sink or swim” environment is a recipe for unmet expectations and a high wash-out rate.

Having established training procedures in place will help new staff develop the skills they need to survive in the fast-paced environment of a busy restaurant.

We’re All in this Together

Improve teamwork, loyalty and staff accountability by making it clear that training and supporting new team members is everyone’s responsibility.

Staff should be constantly looking out for each others’ performance:

• Reinforcing proper behaviors
• Enforcing policies
• Executing procedures
• Developing a culture of excellence

Identify your strongest and weakest team members and have them spend a “coaching shift” together to focus on building skills.

Increase Tips Through Up-Selling

Because tips have a large part to do with how much money employees take home, make sure your staff are trained in exceptional service and sales. When staff are trained to increase their own pay through up-sales they’ll have more work satisfaction.

Increasing a Sense of Loyalty

When you set a consistent standard and obey your own rules it gives your restaurant staff the confidence to “check” each other and themselves. The goal of leadership is to create more leaders, so that you can trust your employees to perform with excellence even when no one is looking.

You must show your team that you have a clear sense of what is wrong and what is right, and that you’ll support them when they follow the rules. This goes a long way in earning the loyalty of your staff.

Call Out the Elephant in the Room

As their leader, you need to address uncomfortable situations to find solutions. Consider distributing anonymous comment cards every 6 months or when you suspect there is something causing tension. When using anonymous comment cards, address the concerns without being defensive. Honest feedback is extremely valuable if you want to keep your staff long term.

You need to be able to address what people are feeling even if they are bringing unexpected or difficult challenges to your attention.