For the champions (staff) who keep our industry running, restaurant work requires long hours, atypical schedules, and a few days off. The grind is real and impacts the health, financial stability, and satisfaction of all types of restaurant employees, no matter their role or tenure.
Feedback from restaurant workers indicates low overall employee happiness compared with other industries, leaving restaurateurs with the task of confronting employee turnover by analyzing standards of workplace happiness and coming up with solutions to make the hospitality industry hospitable for its workers.
What is Workplace Happiness?
Several factors influence workplace happiness, including those needed for daily motivation (like wages, bonuses, and benefits) and others that result in long-term satisfaction (like financial stability, stress, health, and growth opportunities). But workplace happiness in the restaurant the industry is unique.
Restaurants face high employee turnover, with data from a Bureau of Labor Statistics program reflecting a 74.9% turnover rate at restaurants in 2018, elevated from 72.5% in 2017. This number far outpaces the average rate in private sector jobs, estimated at 48.9% for 2018.
Staff employed in restaurants, pubs, bars, cafes, or catering might turn over quickly due to demographics. Moreover, restaurants use high numbers of teenagers, students, and seasonal staffers — and the cost of turnover cost per employee can reach thousands of dollars regarding training, onboarding, and, ultimately, productivity loss.
This cycle becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, where employers avoid investing in employees, believing they will leave within two to three months.
Josh said the goal is to find what employees need to be happy. "If you're working toward that in a healthy way and with support, happiness is what happens, and happiness is nice, but it doesn't support itself without having a reason for being."
Suppose you take the student workers out of the equation. In that case, the restaurant employee turnover remains bleak at best, with hospitality workers reporting lower happiness than those in other industries.
At eatOS, we look into ways of measuring workplace happiness, along with tested and evolving technologies for making each task easy and accurate. As they say, happy workers are the most productive ones. And once you perform well in your workplace, restaurant happiness occurs.
