Reducing staff turnover is critical for success

The hospitality industry, especially 4 & 5-star hotels, spends lots of resources on training the staff.

Training your staff is a key component if you want to have the best practices and standards, be it the hotel accommodation, service standards at the restaurant or the spa.

To ensure staff turn over is low, recognise the staff for their ability. Appreciate them for the good work they do, and when they do make mistakes, teach them what was wrong and show them how this could have been done correctly.

Salary is also important, but salary alone is not sufficient if you want your staff to learn and make progress. Sometimes you may even have to release staff members when we find that they can grow and do much better instead of continuing in the same place. By doing this, you will be doing yourself good as a staff member who has the potential to grow but is not given that opportunity may start to become complacent and redundant.

Recognising your staff and their abilities is important to stop high turnover. Some companies practice binding contracts on the staff they invest in training which is acceptable based on what the investment is for these staff.

One key area of high turnover is to rank and file like housekeeping which is an integral part of the hospitality industry. To continue keeping your staff and to motivate them, have incentive programs like team member of the month, rewards for monthly performance with additional service charge incentives. This helps to keep staff on their feet and to stay focused. These are rewards that when earned, will motivate your team, so they continue to excel.

The ability to recognise the people working well and the leaders will help you to find new supervisors and department leaders.