Stringent security and immigration regulations have put one of hospitality’s current challenges on overdrive: how are employers supposed to fill open positions when there’s a drought of applicants? Add to that historically high turnover rates of 30% of workers quitting within working six months, and the labour crisis gets real.
But as with any crisis before, some businesses have refocused and set themselves up to leapfrog ahead of the competition. We’ve seen industry leaders use three strategies to emerge stronger, and healthier from the current drought of employees:
1. Protect and support current employees
The first step is often to retire antiquated methods like bulletin boards and text messages through non-compliant tools in favour of effective, scalable channels that reach the entire frontline workforce with up to 90% adoption rates. This enables organizations to keep employees updated with changes, new processes, policies, and supportive messages. When paired with social functions like comments, likes or topical channels, this greatly increases the sense of community and culture. In addition, pulse polls can gauge the current sentiment, and compare it with the company average to identify distressed locations.
2. Streamline learning and onboarding
Employers must provide leadership and overcommunicate to keep their teams engaged; further employees need to learn new skills in order to take on evolving business challenges and customer expectations. Management needs to be able to execute more with less staff, which means more upskilling. Typical training systems–often paper-based binders in the back office–fall regrettably short when it comes to preparing a workforce for updated processes. This is further amplified when it comes to onboarding new employees from scratch.
In order to effectively instruct employees in the shortest amount of time, a modern learning system works on a modular basis, breaking complex topics into short, digestible micro-lessons of no more than 5 minutes that can be consumed at work during downtime or at home. Providing a great customer experience is a hands-on activity that needs to be trained and tested as such. Great learning systems assess skills by giving a task that can be evaluated through interactive guidance as well as video proof of the end result.
3. Define, measure, improve
What’s being measured gets done. This is truest in a business context. Being able to answer questions like these can guide organizations toward sustainable growth:
- How many associates saw leadership’s last message?
- What type of content engages employees?
- Which topics and posts are viewed most?
- How effective was the last training initiative?
- Which trainings work best?
Advance and Grow the Business through Your Frontline
Customer expectations are constantly changing and growing, and to remain competitive, hospitality companies need to ensure they have employees with solid qualities, skills and knowledge. WorkJam is the leading digital workplace platform for organizations with frontline and hourly employees where it applies deep expertise of applicable compliance, work rules and workflows.