Staff shortages in hospitality: offering an experience with fewer people

Almost every business runs tighter than five years ago. You don't notice that in the food, because the kitchen holds up. You notice it in the dining room: less time per table, longer waits to order something, and less room for the chat that makes a visit personal.

The reflex is to work harder. That holds up for a while and then costs you people. The other route is looking at which work can be removed without the guest losing out on anything.

Where the pressure really lies

If you walk through a night, it stands out that most interruptions don't come from the order itself but from the waiting around it:

• Guests raising their hand for something small and waiting five minutes until someone walks past.
• Impatience at tables where the food takes long, which leads to extra questions to the waitstaff.
• Chasing reviews afterwards, usually by email and usually without result.
• Children becoming restless and the waitstaff having to work around it.

None of those four is service. It's all work that arises because something else isn't running smoothly.

What you can remove

Re-ordering without waiting

A button on the table that lets a guest order an extra drink removes the main source of hand-raising. The order arrives where it should, and the waitstaff walk once instead of twice.

Waiting time that fills itself

A table that has something to do calls out less. Games on the table require no action at all from your staff: no materials, no explanation, nothing to clear away. See how it works.

Reviews at the right moment

Asking while the experience is fresh delivers more than an email afterwards, and costs no one time.

What you want to remove is not the contact with the guest, but the waiting that eats into that contact.

Keeping people is cheaper than finding people

Replacing an employee costs a job listing, interviews, training time and a period in which the rest have to cover. Reckon on six to eight weeks before someone is as fast as the person who left. In those weeks, quality drops for everything that person touched.

That makes the sums different than they seem. Every measure that lightens the work pays for itself as soon as it prevents one departure per year.

Why people really leave

Rarely for the salary alone. What keeps coming back in exit interviews:

• Rosters announced too late to plan anything around.
• Shifts where you're structurally understaffed, so you can't do anything well.
• The feeling that guest complaints land on you while you can't change anything about it.
• Not a single moment to catch your breath between two peaks.

The first two are about planning. The last two are about how much the work costs you, and that's exactly what this article is about.

Rostering for the moments, not the hours

Most rosters are built on opening hours: someone starts at five, someone else at six. But the pressure in a dining room doesn't spread evenly over the evening.

There are three peaks, and they're all short: the moment the first tables come in and all want to order at the same time, the moment the first main courses go out, and the moment three tables want to pay at once. In between, it's quieter than it feels.

Anyone who puts their staffing on those three peaks instead of spreading it evenly over the evening gets more calm with the same hours. That does require knowing when those peaks fall for you, and that differs per business and per day.

What the staff themselves notice

There's a difference between a heavy shift and an unpleasant shift, and that difference isn't in the number of plates.

• A shift where you walk from A to B and finish that, feels light, even if there are many of them.
• A shift where you're called away halfway through three times, feels heavy, even if there are fewer of them.
• A guest who becomes impatient costs more energy than five guests who don't.

Everything that lowers the number of interruptions thereby lowers the felt workload. That's not a soft gain: it's the main reason people leave hospitality.

What you should specifically not automate

There is a limit, and it's sharper than the providers of these kinds of systems suggest. These three should remain human work:

1. The welcome. A guest who walks in and is greeted by a screen starts off at a disadvantage.
2. The moment something goes wrong. A well-resolved mistake often results in a higher rating than a flawless visit, but only if there's a person facing them.
3. The farewell. That's the last thing someone takes with them.

Everything in between is largely logistics, and logistics can be easier.

What this delivers for your staff

Fewer interruptions means less walking around and fewer moments where someone is called away halfway through something else. That saves physically, but especially mentally: it's the constant switching that makes a shift heavy, not the number of plates.

And it gives back something that's the first casualty with tight staffing: time for the chat at the table that guests remember.

What this costs for your number of tables is on the pricing page.