Staff shortages in hospitality: offering experience with fewer people

Almost every venue is running tighter than five years ago. You won't notice it in the food, because the kitchen holds its own. You'll notice it in the dining room: less time per table, longer waits to order something, and less room for the small talk that makes a visit personal.

The reflex is to work harder. That holds up for a while and then costs you people. The other way is to look at what work can be removed without the guest losing out.

Where the pressure really lies

If you walk through an evening, you'll notice 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 by.
• Impatience at tables where the food is taking a long time, leading to extra questions to staff.
• Chasing reviews afterwards, usually by email and usually without result.
• Children getting restless, which staff have to work around.

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

What you can take away

Reordering 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 belongs, and staff walk over once instead of twice.

Waiting time that fills itself

A table that has something to do calls out less. Table games 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 yields more than an email afterwards, and costs no one any time.

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

Keeping people is cheaper than looking for people

Replacing an employee costs a job listing, interviews, training time and a period during which the rest of the team picks up the slack. Reckon on six to eight weeks before someone is as fast as the person who left. During those weeks quality declines in everything that person touched.

That makes the maths different than it seems. 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 pay alone. What keeps coming up in exit interviews:

• Schedules published 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.
• No moment at all 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.

Scheduling for the moments, not the hours

Most schedules 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 all last briefly: the moment the first tables arrive and all want to order at once, the moment the first main courses go out, and the moment three tables want to pay at the same time. Between those it's calmer 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 your venue, and that differs per venue 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's a lot of it.
• A shift where you get pulled away halfway through three times feels heavy, even if there's less of it.
• One guest getting impatient costs more energy than five guests who don't.

Anything that reduces the number of interruptions thereby reduces the felt work pressure. That's not a soft gain: it's the main reason people quit hospitality.

What you should specifically not automate

There's a limit, and it's sharper than 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 at a disadvantage.
2. The moment something goes wrong. A well-resolved mistake often earns a higher rating than a flawless visit, but only if there's a person on the other side.
3. The farewell. That's the last thing someone takes with them.

Everything in between is largely logistics, and logistics is allowed to be easier.

What it gets your staff

Fewer interruptions means less walking around and fewer moments where someone gets pulled away from something else halfway through. 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 to disappear with tight staffing: time for the conversation at the table that guests remember.

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