Staff shortage in hospitality: offering experience with fewer people

Almost every business runs 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 afterwards costs you staff. The other way is to look at what work can be removed without the guest losing anything.

Where the pressure really lies

If you walk along during an evening, you notice 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 takes long, leading to extra questions to the staff.
• Chasing reviews afterwards, usually by email and usually without result.
• Children who become restless and around whom staff have to work.

None of these 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 staff walk once instead of twice.

Waiting time that fills itself

A table that has something to do calls 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 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 up that contact.

Keeping people is cheaper than looking for people

Replacing a staff member costs a vacancy text, interviews, training time and a period in which the rest picks up the slack. Reckon on six to eight weeks before someone is as fast as the person who left. In those weeks, quality drops 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 wage alone. What keeps coming back in exit interviews:

• Rosters that are known too late to plan anything around them.
• Shifts in which 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.

Scheduling on the moments, not on 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 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 once. In between it's quieter than it feels.

Whoever puts their staffing on those three peaks instead of 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 annoying shift, and that difference isn't in the number of plates.

• A shift in which you walk from A to B and finish it feels light, even if there are many.
• A shift in which you're called away halfway three times feels heavy, even if there are fewer.
• 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 quit in hospitality.

What you should definitely 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 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 goodbye. That's the last thing someone takes away.

Everything in between is largely logistics, and logistics may be made easier.

What it 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 to suffer with a tight team: time for the conversation at the table that guests remember.

What this costs for your number of tables is at the prices.