Is your hotel, restaurant, resort, or casino struggling with staffing? Whether it’s a constant problem or an on-and-off disturbance, you are probably sick of it. If your hospitality business was around before the COVID pandemic, you probably long for the days of yore, when staffing was difficult but not impossible. If your business started up after the pandemic, you might wonder how anyone makes it in this industry when faced with these severe staffing challenges?
Everyone wants to know: is there a solution to the hospitality staffing crisis? The answer is: yes, there are actually three. Unfortunately, the only one that’s a true solution is the one nobody can afford to wait on, so most people end up with hybrid solutions and half measures that manage to work most of the time.
There is only one genuine solution to the hospitality staffing crisis, and that is time. The hospitality staffing situation that existed before COVID had grown up organically over decades. The following U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics will provide insight on the length of time required to get through the hospitality crisis we’re currently experiencing.
The modern hospitality industry started in the 1920s, when the automobile and the airplane gave average Americans the ability to travel far from home to see their country and others. It ramped up in the late 1940s when entertainment-hungry GIs returned from overseas with cash in pocket from wartime surplus and Marshall Plan dividends. It then grew steadily for decades with little in the way of downturns until 2008, when the Great Recession led to the loss of over 600,000 jobs in the industry over two years, a 5% drop in total hospitality employment at the time.
The Great Recession’s impact was dwarfed by COVID. During the pandemic, the hospitality industry lost over 8 million jobs in two months, nearly 50% of industry jobs. It’s impossible for an industry to just walk off that kind of hit to its staffing base. In some ways, the industry has recovered: total employment has taken about the same time to recover as it did after 2008: four years. However, the ongoing staffing crisis is a sign that things have not returned to normal. The jobs are back, but it may take a lot longer for people to really return.
To see how long it might take to recover from this inversion, understand that the pandemic pushed hospitality employment back to 1988 levels. More than three decades of negative growth in just two months. The Great Recession erased just two years of growth, so recovering in two years was reasonable. Fully recovering from the pandemic hopefully won’t take three decades, but it certainly might take two, especially given other disruptions in the market and the proliferation of other opportunities for workers offered by the gig economy, social media, content creation, and more. These were major driving forces behind the Great Resignation, which grew out of and exacerbated the impact of the pandemic.
One of the best things you can do is to invest internally to improve your utilization of the staff that you currently have. Here are four places to put your resources that should reap outsized results in reducing staffing troubles:
One of the easiest ways to improve your staffing situation is to improve incentives. Most businesses in the hospitality industry have increased incentives in recent years, so you should do some research to make sure you’re still competitive.
However, your company culture actually has a much larger impact on retention than compensation does. Figure out what aspects of your corporate culture might be driving turnover. The easiest way to do this is to just ask your employees and listen closely to their answers. If you don’t have a person in your organization that people feel comfortable opening up to, consider getting someone outside the organization to conduct interviews.
Another way to address your staffing situation is to expand your recruitment. This means first being open to hiring different people than you hired in the past. The job market has changed, and it makes sense that your ideal employee should change, too. It also makes sense to try to attract different employees by changing some of your policies to include flexible scheduling, professional development opportunities, and more.
Another key to maximizing your resources is to utilize technology to improve your staffing situation. Technology can make it easier to assemble a workable schedule that keeps your business fully staffed at all times.
Still struggling with staffing troubles? It might be time to consider whether you would benefit from getting help with your staffing.
Fortunately, Xclusive Services is here to help. We can step up when you need short-term help filling your schedule or if you have persistent trouble with fully staffing your business. Xclusive can supply staff for a variety of positions, and we have locations around the country to supply local talent to your hotel, restaurant, resort, or casino.
When you work with Xclusive Services, you will benefit from our Xclusive Excellence™ commitment. We are dedicated to always providing highly qualified staff that will take to their jobs at your business with little need for training and supervision. We have access to a deep talent pool that includes experienced hospitality industry workers, and we choose from it the best candidates, those who are dedicated to providing the exceptional customer service you promise to your guests.
You will also be able to count on:
This makes many of your staffing headaches go away. We can help with any surprise shortages, or we can fully take over your staffing with our turnkey hospitality staffing solution.
Request a quote to learn how we can help, or call a local office now for immediate staffing assistance.
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