The Caterer Blog

Interesting view, in my opinion people will not stay in the hospitality industry, until us in the industry stop using and abusing them to suit our needs. We are in a demanding business, and we are in the people business. the trouble is most of us do not think of our staff as a real asset.

If we reflected on the results of our decisions and worked to a long term plan consistently not a financial year view, with savings and cuts year on year on year, we may get some where. You would think with such a resource of people we could find innovative solutions to produce the results we need to be successful.

Head offices or boards send out requests and demands, with out ensuring correct delivery and consideration for ground employees such as cost cutting requests and the following can and does happen to hospitality employees across the country.

A company offers great talent a great opportunity, they then recruit. In most cases they then do not offer good structured training or real positive support, most companies fail to manage attendance properly, so managers then abuse the willing workers to cover absent staff.

Wage cuts then happen because of sales flagging (root cause - bad management of people) more profit is then required.

Managers then cut the hours that poor Joe had been working, he or she had been appreciating the extra income in his / her pay and bang no overtime were cutting back..... He or she is then left feeling abused, most with not even a thank you. This is only one example of many I can think of that I have seen over the last 20 years.

Until we as an industry take ownership and a proactive approach which is consistent, and ensure we communicate, manage, train and forecast in our business taking our employees welfare into consideration. We will never attract and keep the numbers of quality people we need. Let’s look in our back gardens first before blaming.

This is not aimed at any company in particular but poor business practices in the hospitality industry affects us all. It’s a shame as Joe who left could of one day been some one great, instead they have found another opportunity in another less demanding industry.

Dear Grant,
I read your opinion and accept your status in the trade. When I started in the business it was run by people with knowledge and time in it. Today it is run by accountants. I agree we do not have to be servile but we do need to offer a service. I have spent all my life in the trade from washup to Group MD. In all that time I have always taught the people comming up my job. It is about team work. I am still in contact with people who worked for and with me 40 years ago. Skills that need to be uased in our trade are to empower people,share good and bad, understanding, talk, think, praise and solve problems together. In a low wage business it has to be about bringing everyone together in a team. I have always told GM's the most important person in your hotel is the cleaner. Good ones are hard to find GM's always about. I am comming up to 60. I have seen and done every job in the trade. I have in the years seen good and bad. No one wants to employ me now with all my experience. Yet young managers and staff could learn so much from a company mentor. I used them years ago. What a difference. A person who has no intention of taking their job.Yet motivates them to go for it and get results. Someone who is at the end of a phone. Not someone pushing them to make profit. Yet a mentor can increase the bottom line.
£250m on training ,maybe but has it been in the right direction? Training needs to be geared to the requirements of the trade at the time. Thats why in the late 60's everyone trained as a grill chef for the jobs were in Berni Inns.
2012 Olympics well we need to start training people now whomever is in charge. There are a lot of older people with years of experience that HR managers and companies do not want. What a waste when we need to train new staff the people with the experience are not required.

Dear Grant

Congratulations on your appointment. You have a wonderful opportunity to promote and forge the future for this marvelous industry. We need to promote professionalism in the industry. Firstly, a major part of this needs to come from within, we all have a part to play, and must use every opportunity to promote the positive aspects of our chosen careers, and work alongside industry bodies, especially the HCIMA to promote the diversity and excitement of a career in hospitality. Secondly, we need to move away for the short-termism of employment. Managers tend to recruit to solve a short term needs, instead of taking a more formulated long term view with career prospects. We are unable to contiunue to operate by filling vacancies with students who can hardly communicate in the English language, and are only in the country for a short while. We are operating in a global market-place and visitors look for local knowledge of an area to build on their experiences, people need to be recruited for their genuine warmth and hospitable nature. Thirdly, training needs to play a large part with a diverse range of
seminars to cover every aspect of the skills required to build successful, customer focused and knowledge based workforce.
The Olympics are our one chance of a world-wide window, that could, if handled correctly have a positive impact on inbound visitor numbers for years to come,one chance to get it right..

Good luck, I shall be following your progress with interest.

Max Lawrence

Dear Grant,

After reading your article ‘Time to change perception of hospitality’, I would like to say that the industry has moved on some what since I start working in it 14 years ago at the age of 16. I love the industry like may people because every day is different and promotional options are good. The industry is exciting and was never a second choice of career for me.

However, youngsters that do come into the industry are fast put off by a lot of issues the unsociable hours, low pay and most of all bad management. What has really struck me in the last few years is the ability that we as managers can have on training and motivating our staff to go that extra mile in proving a great service. Our staffs are the back bone of the industry; we should train them and treat them with respect.

Working aboard for many years I have experienced the different in service and staff motivations. It is high time that the government in Britain and leading hospitality bodies give the hospitality industry the value that it deceives and re-looked at the hospitality education/training system.

I have decided to move on from my job as a Deputy Manager of a hotel into the hospitality training & development sector, in the hope that more youngsters will join the industry and see it as a career and not just a job. I hope that in the long run the hospitality industry in Britain can become a top-three sector; I believe that we do have the talent and skills to make this become a reality.

Dear Grant,

Congratulations on speaking your mind and bringing to the surface what I would call a long standing social disease we have in this country.

As a retired Catering Manager and now a part-time teacher of F & B Services at a North London Catering College,
I am experiencing first hand with our students the syndrome of confusing service with servility. The press and media have played a tremendous part over the year, not from the upstairs-downstairs hangover, but by providing celebrity chef icons for students to emulate.

Let’s look at what incentives and tools of motivation are in place for someone working in a restaurant. Knives and forks have been in the same place since cutlery was first invented, the napkins are laid flat for the sake of style or still the old fashion fan. What skills and innovation is there on this scenario,

Anyone responsible for running a restaurant must stop and think “What can I do to motivate my team?”. Proper service skills of course come to the top of the list. Customer care courses and wine courses are equally important. What about more responsibility and trust, employee of the month, in house social skills competition - a free lunch or dinner for the winner as well as his or her immediate family on a day that otherwise the restaurant would be almost empty? How about it, for a morale buster.
How does one know if an employee has a particular talent and abilities or artistic imagination that could put to a good use on special day or for special functions? The one which I found very successful was a job change or better known as “skills sharing”. This became extremely useful when we had unforeseen emergencies in the kitchen or in the restaurant. Needle to say, that it saved the day in more then one occasion.

Staff are one of the major assets in any establishment. Job satisfaction is the best engine to maintain your staff. Managers need to go on courses on how to build the trust of the staff and create satisfaction in what they do so that it is not “just a job” but a career in the Hospitality industry and for them to be proud to be within it.
One must never forget the criteria for the “Investors’ Award Certificate” and keep this principal well after the award is obtained.
Furthermore let’s not bash the colleges and catering schools for the stigma of the industry, the blame lays on the social structure of the country as a whole.

Luigi Spotorno FCMA
Training Consultant and Author
Hospitality Training Solutions
napkinfolding@excite.com

Grant

I am Principal of Westminster Kingsway College one of London's major providers of training for the hospitality industry. Your Caterer article succinctly summarises many of the perceptions I hear from across the hotel sector and I agree with you that, if we are to take advantage of the Government's investment in skills and other opportunities such as the Olympics, we must find innovative ways of matching the needs of the industry with the offers major training providers like WKC make. The London Mayor's Board, along with the Government's response to Sir Sandy Leitch's recent report on skills in the UK, provide a real opportunity to reassess both the supply and demand side of the training conundrum.

Westminster Kingsway makes an ever widening offer to the hospitality sector. It includes:
- traditional hospitality management programmes to prepare young people for work in the industry
- Foundation Degree and Degree programmes in hospitality management
- leadership and management training delivered through the VSQ Professional Development Centre, a partnership with the Savoy Education Trust and University of Westminster
- extensive Customer Service training
- apprenticeship programmes for hotel groups such as Accor and InterContinental
- full and part time food preparation and service training
- Futurechef and school-link programmes for those showing an early interest in hospitality
- fully subsidised Train to Gain programmes
- bespoke commercially oriented courses for major restaurant chains
- English where it is not an employees first language.

Any of these programmes can be delivered in college or the workplace. The only limitation to their customisation is client demand and the extent of the public fee subsidy required. You mention our failure to address the needs of the budget sector but content can often be specifically tailored and where it is not we ensure students have experience across the range. So, for example, all of the chefs on our highly successful culinary arts programme undertake a placement in a contract catering outlet operated by Compass.

You and other correspondents successfully articulate the employer components of the demand side and the list above gives a flavour of the capabilities of the supply side. As is so often the case when a market is not working as it should, the problem is in making the connection between the two. As colleges, we need to be much sharper at defining and marketing a sector-specific portfolio which is currently perceived as indistinguishable from all of the other things we do. Perhaps then employers might be more receptive to partnering with us to further shape the product in response to their business needs. The offer of high quality training, supported by a prominent sector brand, with the assurance of fulfilling employment in a vibrant industry would surely encourage those who are unsure about a career in hospitality to reconsider.

I just want to thank everyone who's taken time to put their views forward - very enlightening and much appreciated. They were so interesting and informed, in fact, that we've decided to feature them in next week's magazine...for those in the industry who aren't yet up to speed with the world of blogging..

We will, of course, forward them to Grant Hearn - as promised.

Coming from another part of the world where the hospitality industry is a profession, I am continually amazed that no one here gets it! I work with staff regularly, they are the ones who are the face of the business, provide the so called service and then get shit on when its all said and done... and all for a meazly £4.00 odds an hour. I have had a heart to heart with many of these people who confess that the biggest problem with the uk is the fact that no one from here recognises a little thing called tipping. Do you know that you can actually not tip in this country and get away with it? I find that appaulling. The good people in this trade are starting to get wise and seek out the "American" fed hotels so they can actually earn what they are worth.BUT THEN.. these resort properties are "pooling" tips so that the lazy guy gets his bit even though all he's done is turn up for work. What this country needs is decent in house training, awareness that tipping earns great service, and that if people do tip, the person rewarded actually gets to keep it! Now that's what I called a hard earned dollar...I mean pound.

Dear Grant,

Congratulations on your appointment to Ken's board.

We read your blog with interest and felt your sentiments closely echoed our own. Indeed, where is the money going? Certainly not to us, nor you, it seems! Or indeed any of the other hospitality associations we're closely aligned with. And Sandra Scott seems to be an enigma to us, you and many others.

The Academy of Food and Wine has refocused its activities over the past 18 months, as the professional body for Food and Wine service personnel, with a new team of seasoned industry professionals.

We are a not-for-profit organisation, reliant on membership fees, sponsorship and donations from charities to prevail financially and cover our costs. We also work with many of the other professional bodies in the industry under the Hospitality Skills Alliance as well as working with Springboard and People 1st.

One raison d'etre of the Academy of Food & Wine is to help position jobs in front of house service as part of an exciting career path, with similar hero's and icons as currently enjoyed by the chef sector. To achieve this we have set up two high profile committees one for Wine and one for Food comprising Gerard Basset, Ronan Sayburn, Silvano Giraldin and Conor O'Leary, who work with us in developing exciting competitions, dinners and training programmes.

Our events are also now on most peoples "must attend" lists especially the Sommeliers' Dinner, The Wine Waiter of the Year Competition, The Restaurant Managers' Dinner and The Academy's Annual Travel Scholarships, all of which are helping to improve the value and awareness of front of house service as an exciting career.

However, we realise that if we are going to make a difference we will all have to pull together. Over the past eighteen months the AFW has been developing a Training Roadmap which when funded and finalised will enable service personnel to develop from pre-NVQ/ VRQ level 1 up to level 5. These qualifications will be in league with many other industry bodies, including the Academy of Culinary Arts and HCIMA and we hope that they will become part of People 1st's National Qualifications Framework for the hospitality sector. The idea is we work together to create a clear path for people to follow, rather than duplicate existing courses and training.

The problem we currently have is to secure the funding and then the approval of the courses without getting mired in the bureaucracy of it all - a problem which you also seem to have encountered!

However, this has not stopped our endeavours and the most exciting new venture which we have been able to develop from our own very limited resources is "the Licence to Work" in the hospitality service sector which we have managed to fund ourselves (just!). It comprises a 30 hour (5 day) course aimed primarily at the unemployed, overseas workers and returnees to the labour market.

The course includes an introduction to the hospitality industry and career paths, role play practical food and wine service training exercises, along with an introduction to customer service, the basic food hygiene certificate (RIPH certified), an introduction to health and safety issues, appearance/interview coaching and will be properly tested and assessed and endorsed by the HCIMA. Each successful candidate will also receive an AFW/ People 1st Skills Passport which will be stamped by us as registered verifiers and can then be added to as the candidate progresses through the industry.

Armed with this "licence to work" candidates will have the confidence to deliver appropriate customer service in a relaxed and friendly manner - much like our antipodean cousins!

This course satisfies a key priority for the Government in getting people back to work as well as importantly for the Industry determining a minimum standard for service employees and a ready made well of new staff for the industry. It can also be easily amended to support the existing induction programmes of both small and large industry employers.

With the Olympic Games in 2012 the UK is going to need a minimum entry standard for up to 30,000 additional service staff and we now have developed the course to help ensure this minimum standard can be achieved. In the meantime of course it will also help to provide a more immediate incoming pool of new employees into the industry.

I do hope that government start to listen to 'industry' and begin to invest in courses and training that we actually need and want. As it will only be by us all working together that we will see any significant change.

Hi Grant.

I've just left the Industry....For Good.
Despite working extremely hard to gain all the necessary qualifications, and working for many years at the sharp end of the market as a Chef (The West End of London), where it's always busy, the rewards for the hard work and the long hours are simply not attractive enough compared with other industries.
I've worked more 15+ hour days than I care to remember. On the rare afternoons off on split shifts, during the hour or so away, you can never truly relax, as you know you're going back for another pasting in the evening.
Caterering Employers seem to see this sort of scenario as a 'right' and that employees will work all the hours thrown at them. Well, that's true to some extent, but hey, it never seems to dawn on them that their 'decent wage' is, in reality, absolutely lousy when you divide it into an hourly rate in real terms.
I have NEVER in all my years in the trade been paid for overtime, Public Holidays, or seen one penny in tips.
My friends get generous bonuses from their jobs. They also get paid enhanced rates for working public Holidays and for overtime.
They also get their evenings off with their families, and weekends to chill out.
So as of Monday, this "Highly Qualified Chef" will be hanging up his knives, binning the uniforms, and calling it a day, as i set off for my new job in engineering.
the ridiculous thing about it is this.
Despite having NO qualifications whatsoever, in real terms I will be earning more doing this than I ever did in Catering for the reasons I've stated.
£400 a week sounds a lot for Catering but over 87 hours it actually works out to a paltry £4.59 an hour.....which is less than the Legal National Minimum Wage!!
On my new job, £400 a week equates to a 40 hour week of £10 an hour.
Now THAT's more like it!
Until Catering starts to pay proper hourly rates for the job, and treats its staff like valued skilled workers, it is never going to be an attractive proposition.
But the saddest thing of all, is this.
As a highly skilled and trade qualified worker, I will not be passing those skills on to others. There is already a chronic skills shortage in the trade, and it will increase. So those skills will be lost to the trade forever.
To conclude: Why should anyone even consider a career in a job where the hours are extremely long, extremely arduous, and extremely poorly paid, whilst their friends are doing more 'normal' jobs, earning more, being appreciated more by their employers, and enjoying time with their families, working normal office hours?
Short answer is. No reason whatsoever.

Ken.

As a family we have stayed in several Travel Lodges over the past few years.
It is my birthday today, 7/10/2007.
I pre booked a family room via this website for 6/10/2007 departure 7/10/2007.
we were visiting Blackpool on the Saturday 6/10/2007 and
as we were taking the children to see the illuminations, we wanted to stay overnight in your Lodge in Preston, which was the nearest we could get to Blackpool.
I pre payed for the booking with my debit card. the booking reference is 131657721.
We spent the day in Blackpool. Had our evening meal and then went through the illuminations with our children.

When we arrived at your Preston Central Lodge, our youngest daughter,
who is disabled had fallen asleep and I went to the check in with my other daughter who is age 14, to check in and then return to the car for overnight bags and for my partner who was carrying our youngest daughter.
Your male receptionist could not find our name and our booking.
Then a young woman receptionist came in to help and they both said that our booking was for the previous night, arriving on 5/10/2007 and departing on 6/10/2007.
I told them that as it was my birthday on the 7th I had booked it for the 6th for one night to depart on my birthday the 7th. They argued with me and said that there was nothing that they could do as they were full and even had one extra booking which they could not fit in. They turned us away, late at night with two children and no where to go. Tired and very distressed, I had to inform the family that we had no where to stay and
then had to try and manouver our car (a mobility people carrier, out of your very small and dangerous under hotel car park)

We then had to drive around to find accomodation for our family.
We needed to stay overnight locally as our older daughter was to play football in Blackpool at 12 noon on the 7th.
We drove around, not knowing the area for about an hour then a garage told us to go to the Tickled Trout Hotel near the M6 motorway. Which we did, but they had no family rooms and we had to book two rooms at a cost of £79 each, thus taking the cost of one nights stay up to £197.

I will never forgive your company for causing us so much trauma and so much money.
I am going to see my solicitor tomorrow and I am asking you to refund the total cost of our one night's accommodation which is £197. Our solicitor may also suggest that we claim compensation for stress and dissapointment, not mention the petrol we used searching
for another hotel. Your company caused us unreasonable anguish.

Glenys Fletcher

I am considering the small claims court to get a refund for a cancelled booking. I have emailed several times to customer services and all I get is a standard response and no action! Why do you not give a contact number for your customer relations, is this because you know you will be inundated with calls? It's all very well doing things by email and internet but you must have a system that works for the customer, without customers you won't have a business!

To change the perception of the industry of those who use it, we first need to change the perception of those who work in it.

As it is naturally a high turnover industry, with scores of students and part time workers, it has long been seen as a stop-gap for quick money, with no skills needed.

I work as an NVQ trainer and assessor, and the attitudes that I come across from management when trying to promote these courses to the staff, is 'Why bother? It will only take time out of their work, and then when they are finished, they will just leave anyway.'

If the staff are not felt more valued in their work, and an effort shown by employers that they are willing to pay to train their employees and invest in their future, then what reasons do staff have to stay?

Potential hospitality employees need to be shown that it one of the most energetic, rewarding careers there is, with the potential for work in all countries. The amount of life experience and skills you can gain from one job cannot be beaten by any other industry. They also need to be shown that it is a career to be proud of, and not just another job in a restaurant. By being proud of your work, you will show customers that you are successful and happy, which will bring around their attitudes to the service industry, and give it the respect that is long overdue.