Before revealing the identity of this year's Olive Barnett Award winner at London's Langham Hotel earlier this week, Ian Scarth of Switzerland's L'Ecole Hoteliere de Lausanne introduced a neat twist in his speech to the gathered guests.
Ian read out a quote "full of, inspiring, logical and profound words", which turned out not to have been penned by a leading hospitality exec, academic or consultant, but to comprise one paragraph from the submissions of each of the eight finalists.
It's an impressive quote, and I post it here in full:
"The impact of high staff turnover is associated with high cost and time spent sourcing new recruits. This often leads to the wrong people in the wrong jobs, which in turn results in low productivity and goes on to impacts team dynamics and eventually affects guest satisfaction and thus profits.With an average of 42.5% in 2006, the hotel, catering and leisure industry has the highest rate of employee turnover of all industry sectors in the United Kingdom. This has an enormous impact on profitability, in the form of costly recruitment, low productivity and disruption to the smooth running of daily operations, as well as the lose of skills and knowledge to other industries. The industry calculates the cost of replacing front line staff to be £1500 per person and as mush as £4000 per manager. By the year 2012 this figure will total a staggering £6.2billion.
Although good recruitment and retention are one of the main challenges that face the hospitality industry today, they can equally be a company's greatest asset in obtaining the ever elusive edge on the market.
As companies go looking for people with the right attitude, smile, inherent warmth and natural talent. We must recognize the important fact that people do not work for companies. People work for people. When staff are happy with the people they work with and are inspired by there supervisors they are less likely to leave a company.
There are many ways to retain competent and passionate customer-facing employees one way is to provide your staff with consistent training programmes, on going motivation and useful support, making them feel self assured with enough knowledge to tackle any task in an appropriate manner. However, it is also important to set your employees challenges in order to stimulate them and keep their work interesting, doing so serves to broaden their experience and further enhance their development.
Businesses should recognize that effective recruitment and retention of quality staff gives them the cutting edge over their counterparts in other industries. Before organizations can improve, they need to understand the full impact this can have on their businesses.
In conclusion, time, money and energy are best invested in hard working skilled staff. Your employees sell your businesses and without the right people, the business is never going to reach its full potential."
