Staff shortage in hospitality: offering experience with fewer people

Almost every venue 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 losing out on anything.

Where the pressure really lies

If you walk through a night, 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 walks by.
• Impatience at tables where the food is taking long, leading to extra questions to the staff.
• Chasing reviews afterwards, usually by email and usually without result.
• Children who get restless, which the staff has 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 ask no effort 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 isn't the contact with the guest, but the waiting that eats up that contact.

Keeping people is cheaper than finding people

Replacing an employee costs a job listing, interviews, training time and a period where 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. In those weeks, quality drops in everything that person touched.

That makes the calculation different than it seems. Any measure that lightens the work pays for itself as soon as it prevents one departure per year.

Why people really leave

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

• Rosters that are announced too late to plan anything around.
• Shifts where you're structurally understaffed, so you can't do anything properly.
• 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.

Scheduling around the moments, not the hours

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

There are three peaks, and they all last a short time: the moment the first tables come in 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 places 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 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 it feels light, even if there are many.
• A shift where you're called away halfway three times feels heavy, even if there are fewer.
• One guest getting impatient costs more energy than five guests who don't.

Anything that reduces the number of interruptions thereby reduces the felt workload. That's not a soft win: it's the main reason people quit in 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 leads to a higher rating than a flawless visit, but only if there's a person on the other side.
3. The goodbye. That's the last thing someone takes with them.

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

What it gives your staff

Fewer interruptions means less running around and fewer moments where someone is called away halfway through something else. That saves physically, but mostly 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 tight staffing: time for the conversation at the table that guests remember.

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