Staff shortages in hospitality: offering an experience with fewer people

Almost every establishment is running tighter than five years ago. You don't notice it 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 giving anything up.

Where the pressure really lies

If you walk an evening floor, it's noticeable that most interruptions don't come from the order itself but from the waiting around it:

• Guests who raise their hand for something small and wait five minutes until someone passes by.
• Impatience at tables where the food is taking a while, leading to extra questions for the waiting staff.
• Chasing reviews afterwards, usually by email and usually without result.
• Children becoming restless, which the waiting 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 remove

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 the waiting staff make one trip instead of two.

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 delivers more than a follow-up email and costs no one any time.

What you want to remove isn't contact with the guest, but the waiting that eats into that contact.

Keeping people is cheaper than finding people

Replacing a member of staff costs a job advert, interviews, training time and a period in which the rest have to cover. Reckon on six to eight weeks before someone is as quick as the person who left. In those weeks quality drops in everything that person touched.

That makes the sums different from how they look. Any measure that lightens the workload pays for itself as soon as it prevents one departure per year.

Why people really leave

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

• Rosters announced too late to plan anything around.
• Shifts where you're structurally short-staffed, 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.

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 across the evening.

There are three peaks, and they're all short: 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. In between it's quieter than it feels.

Anyone who puts their staffing on those three peaks instead of spreading it evenly across the evening gets more calm with the same hours. That does require knowing when those peaks fall for you, and that differs by venue and by 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 go from A to B and finish it feels light, even if there are a lot of them.
• A shift where you're called away halfway through three times feels heavy, even if there are fewer of them.
• One impatient guest costs more energy than five guests who don't become impatient.

Anything 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 shouldn't automate at all

There's a line, 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 facing them.
3. The farewell. That's the last thing someone takes away.

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

What it delivers for your staff

Fewer interruptions means less walking about and fewer moments where someone is called away halfway through something else. That saves physically, but above all 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 go with a tight team: time for the conversation at the table that guests remember.

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