This is a short piece from Brad Hicks about employee shortages and business management. It's something to think about.
--Kim
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Also, since the whole punditocracy has spent the last week talking about "the great resignation" (and Eris knows I've probably read most of it), I want to say something about the Great Resignation. Pass this along to any friends or family members you know, ESPECIALLY the ones who own or manage restaurants, because restaurants are the businesses complaining the most. And legitimately so -- it turns out they ARE the industry with the highest job-openings-to-applicants ratio, many many times more job openings than applicants.
By now you've heard that if you're not offering wages that are competitive, you're just going to have to suck it up and pay what the restaurant next door or down the street is paying, and pass the cost along in price increases. Lord knows I've seen example after example, even in my VERY mixed-income neighborhood, of restauranteurs who said "I can't raise my prices or nobody will come!" who raised their prices and people still came. So I agree with everybody else that if you haven't tried that, it's worth trying that.
But I don't think that that's the main reason why you're struggling to hire, the reason why so many of your former employees are now working for other restaurants, or even for legendarily awful places to work like Uber or Instacart or Amazon. Because there are plenty of other restaurants, at all price points, that don't have any trouble hiring or retaining staff at all.
You need to look in the mirror. And if you have shift supervisors, you need to look REALLY closely at your shift supervisors. Because, as Pfeffer & Sutton documented in their classic management text, /Hard Truths, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense/ (a book EVERY manager and supervisor and small business owner needs to read, frankly), people don't quit because of money. They don't even quit because they got a better offer, most of the time.
The absolute number one reason people quit and refuse to come back is that they hate their boss. And you were never taught how to be a boss, were you? You're doing it the way your boss did it before you. You're following your gut. Well, let me throw a common management problem at you and offer you three possible answers. Which one would you have picked, before you read this?
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An essential employee calls you at the absolute last minute, maybe even after they were already supposed to be there, and says, "I can't come in. My babysitter flaked on me, and I've got nobody to watch my kid while I work." Pick one:
Option 1: BULLY HER INTO COMING IN. Threaten her with job loss. If that doesn't do it, belittle her, tell her how easy she'd be to replace. Call her every insulting name in the book, and then get creative with your profanity. Make sure she knows just how angry you are at her disloyalty. OR ELSE ...
Option 2: SUCK IT UP AND DEAL. Explain to her that you really don't have anybody else to cover the shift. When that doesn't work, accept the fact that it's your fault for not budgeting enough staff that you can keep the shop open even if an employee misses a shift to illness, car trouble, or family emergency. Work the shift yourself, or close early. OR ELSE ...
Option 3: FIX HER PROBLEM. She wants to work, but can't. You want her to work. Find a way to make it work. Think about everybody you know who COULD watch her kid, FIND her a babysitter. Hell, maybe offer to watch her kid yourself. Or call a relative or a friend that you'd trust to watch your own kids and ask them if they can do it this one time? Put them in touch, and then, when she comes in, offer any advice you can come up with to help her find more reliable child-care, and if between you you can't, keep working on it when you can, keep researching, keep thinking about it.
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If you picked option 1, let your anger do the talking? That's why none of the employees you laid off during covid want to come back. You are going to go out of business. Start planning around that assumption now. You maybe got away with that for a while, but those days are gone. If you need therapy for your anger issues, maybe this is a good time to consider BetterHelp. Also, think really hard about taking a few business administration courses through the local community college.
Because yelling at her didn't solve your problem, did it? Not only did you not successfully bully her into *abandoning her kid* (for Christ's sake!) but she's probably not coming in tomorrow, either, or ever again. And she's going to tell everybody she knows about it, too.
If you picked option 2, you're a minimally decent person, congratulations. But you didn't solve her problem and you didn't solve yours, did you?
Option 3 is the only answer that minimizes employee turnover in low-wage businesses. If people are willing to work low-wage jobs, they have to love the job, but, more importantly, they're going to need non-cash assistance to solve the problems that you, or anybody else better paid, would just throw money at. If you haven't done that, not just with sudden absenteeism but with every problem that an employee has that has resulted in them costing you money, disappointing you, or even pissing you off?
Have a nice bankruptcy. Because no matter how much they suck at their jobs, you suck at yours, too, and should do something else while you take the classes to teach you how to do better next time.
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