Revisiting Turnover
Harvard Business Review always has my attention, and piqued it with the title “The Solution to Service-Worker Churn”. The stats they provide are staggering, but not surprising. The general tone of the article talks a great deal about the retail component but I think there’s plenty of things to carry over effectively.
Not being one to worry about my website stats, go, go on. Read the HBR article and I urge you to make a free account to see more articles from them and then come back here and listen to my gripes and see if the article struck the same chords with you.
Cliff’s Notes
So one of the most frustrating things for an article so ambitiously named is the prescription. You will get the sense that HBR has very intelligent people willing to say the thing people don’t like to hear. “It’s a complicated situation and you have to create your own unique solution.” No real problem there, in fact I admire the integrity.
The real problem I have with this 4 point solution and the summary metrics before hand is how wildly unrealistic it is for most SMB employers. Fairness, stability, predictability, control & physical fatigue. Using baseball as a beloved metaphor you consider resting important players, having them ready for prime holidays, shifts etc. These aren’t uncommon tactics, if a niche way to frame the thinking.
But outside of retail, big box stores, and even restaurant chains, stability and predictability are wildly out of question for businesses themselves much less for the staff. SMB restaurants could solve many of their own problems with consistent business. Staffing and creating an amazing experience alone does not stop doors from closing on restaurants no matter how much we romanticize the narrative. It happens every day.
This problem also introduces a new dimension only partially covered in the article, staff that sell on commission. For our purposes we can assume servers operate off the same, but more variable model. What is a tip besides a commission on the sale decided by the customer? With the variability above, even if you have a great work environment, servers will leave if the sales environment is poor. There is no scheduling solution to solve this issue. Your sales can only support so many servers, especially great ones.
To Thine Own Self Be True
Point number one in their enumerated roll out of custom schedules for your service industry business is akin to, “Heal thyself”. It says, “Identify the factors driving turnover”. Once again I really have to give credit where it’s due. Managers on the front lines of many an SMB do know exactly what the problem is but not want to address or admit it. We live in a world where managers have personal biases about sex, race, attitude and appearance. Managers may be operating off of outdated interpretations of skill or not correctly training and communicating policies. Fairness, stability and fatigue are all levers pulled for malicious and benevolent reasons by managers.
Beyond this, HBR says that data is the important factor, not intuition or outright awareness of the problem. They mention earlier in the article that most business should have all the data they need to make these changes without adding more metrics or collection points to their process.
(My best Marisa Tomei Impression)- “Now I ax’ ya…” What scheduling data do you have in place at your restaurant for stability, control, fairness and satisfaction of shifts? I haven’t seen one in 14 years. The best I have seen are communicative managers who are involved with the staff and understand having a life, breaks, and exercising sympathy when life throws curve balls at people. Restaurants don’t have or need a 1-5 smiley face scale on the nightly checkout report about how your shift went, or what a schedule looks like. Many restaurants are open 360 days a year and need reliability and solutions, not goodwill and understanding.
A penchant for self sabotage
The real solutions the article is tap dancing around for restaurants is the following.
Money
Organization
Properly staffed teams
There’s no getting around it. Money is the most important factor. I don’t advocate toxic work environments in the slightest but a lot of staff will tolerate one when it pays the bills and puts money in savings. If they’ll tolerate a toxic one for money, they’ll fight and die for a positive environment that pays. This challenge is what makes turnover and retention so sticky in the restaurant business. You probably have a month of bad sales as a timer until good staff start leaving as their financial situation deteriorates with the restaurants’, outside of regular slow seasons. You need to fight two complicated battles at once, retaining staff and raising sales. This is not an uncommon way for a restaurant to start spiraling.
HBR and my own prescription for #2 includes intelligent policies and organization as your shield, not data. HBR comments on workers with less than a week of notice on schedules and shift changes, to orgs that posted 3 weeks in advance. The average was 12 days. This falls below the requirement in Illinois of 14 days, although, this legislation is aimed at the big dogs (250+ employees company wide). This legislation is important to consider even for SMB. It paints the picture of the minimum effort for people who are legally required to have their shit together. You may not have an obligation with a staff of 20, but you have a clear indicator for why you are losing to the big guys when you have hectic scheduling that doesn’t benefit employees as well as the business.
It may seem hypocritical to mention “properly staffed teams” when the whole issue is staffing, rounding right back to “heal thyself”. But the question here is, do you know what an ideal team size is for your business? Do you routinely over staff so you always have someone to call? Are you just constantly understaffed and don’t know what it looks like to have the schedule under control?
A standard rule of thumb taught to me years ago was to make sure that you had about 50% additional coverage per zone, during busy season. This means, bar, kitchen, servers, dish etc. This is obviously a luxury, and the building in question was a big one, allowing us to have a wide pool of staff. We were able to avoid overtime, work around call outs and had extra and willing help for last minute groups and parties signing contracts a few days in advance. This is obviously an environment where the workplace is favored in the balance, making a high competition field for shifts.
You too can calculate this, and adjust. Make a spreadsheet about the number of labor hours you realistically need across the week per position and then compare it to the labor hours available without OT on your roster. If you’re small, you may only be able to afford 15-20% additional coverage, and some of it may be cross trained employees. Start here while you fight to solve other problems. At the very least you have targets for how much to hire and retain if you’re playing behind the eight ball. You also see the limits and cracks in fairness when you only have 2 serving shifts on Fri-Sat and two top notch employees who need to be on those shifts to retain them.
I have not forgotten about Section 1 paragraph 3 about how consistency and security for the busienss makes a lot of these solutions possible. There is a solution for making long term schedules safely even with volatile sales environemnts, and one that I railed on recently. Forecasting. Your business does not exist in a vaccuum, 90% of businesses do not have the luxury of improving without effort. Even those that grow naturally due to good ops and location need to staff for the growth to protect quality of service. Financial planning tools and self reflection on your business trends are the smartest way to make the chit chat of articles like mine, and HBR, real for your business in the coming weeks. Project for larger windows, schedule for longer periods so people can plan their lives, patch shift fairness with other revenue centers and raise the bar on the team overall. You can still lose long term employees to life changes, vacation etc. There should always be promising candidates to move up or take over roles in your business.