Photo by Alex Jones on Unsplash

The best restaurateurs know that there are several important things other than a good restaurant menu, that plays a vital role to bring customers in the door. And, staffing is the major one.

From experienced chefs to waiters and front desk person, everyone is harder to find and retain. Today, every restaurant owner feeling the pain to get and retain a good staff. And the new restaurants face this issue at a great difficulty. A good staff is not only responsible for enhancing the services quality and productivity but eventually improves the business growth and retain the loyal, regular customers. So, it is important to consider these staffing problems for a smooth running of your business or restaurant.

Here’s the list of issues that requires attention

Cost of Staffing

According to the National Restaurant Association, restaurant wages range from $8 an hour for dishwashers to around $20 for bartenders. However, a chef can earn about $12 an hour, while waiters and waitresses get about $16.

In dollars and cents, an average cost of hiring an hourly restaurant employee can be as much as $3,500. Thus, restaurateurs spend over 50% of their monthly budget on the staffing costs. Especially in the peak hours, they need extra serving staff to make sure they creating great experiences when they are at their busiest. It directly means that all those extra staff employees take a huge bite out of their profits.

Health insurance and other health benefits are one of the main features used to attract and retain loyal workers. But, most restaurants cannot support quality health insurance coverage for their staff. And, even if a restaurant owner does allow to pay a bit of the cost, the incentives are still excessively high for restaurant staff to afford.

As the U.S economy is on the rise, the unemployment rates are going down nowadays, and restaurateurs facing problem in recruiting and retaining employees. On the other hand, the existing workforce is getting aged out. And, a number of people in the age group under 16 to 24 are joining less. All restaurateurs are facing the shortage of good candidates and recruiting cost is rising at the same time. It is forcing restaurant owners to find alternate ways to reduce their staffing cost.

Higher Turnover

Nowadays, people are more apt to leave their current jobs due to getting new opportunities. Similarly, in the restaurant industry, there is a huge increase in employee turnover and attrition rate.

Smaller as well as big restaurants face the problem of hiring wrong people and have a high turnover rate. However, it is important for hiring and training the right staff. As an inexperienced staff can also damage your current and expected client base. Without proper training, they are unable to perform their task well. So, here you need to spend lots of time to give them proper training, especially in the case of the new staff.

Longer Work Hours

Restaurant workers are often needed to work when others are on holiday/vacation. The restaurant may be occupied during these times because people prefer to go for a late-night dinner and lunch to enjoy their day.

In these days, employees have to work 7 days a week, 12 hour a day, for offering non-stop services. Sometimes, it starts early morning for meal preparation and then finishes late for a wrap up the day. These long working hours are not only burdensome for restaurant employees but also taxing on their health.

To avoid this, you need to recruit more workers for the effective running of your business. In the holidays and vacations, more and more families spend time with their family members and friends at shops, restaurants, and cafes. That means, it is a great thing for your business. As the more people will come to your restaurant, the more profit you’ll earn. But, you need more employees to serve them, as compared to other normal days. The holiday hourly wages of the employees are more than the regular wages. So, it is also a big challenge for restaurateurs.

Language Barriers

In 2008, the NRA reported that 40% of quick-service restaurateurs hired more foreign-born workers rather than English speakers. This pretends hurdles for conveying work instructions, as well as maintaining safety, and in some cases may require beginning language guides to managers or others. However, it adds cost to train languages and communication skills to the employees.

So, it is better to find the employees who are fluent in English as it is necessary to have a staff of qualified employees who are able to communicate with their other staff members and customers in other to provide great customer support and experience to their guests. A language and communication is another serious issue that restaurateurs face while staffing.

Scheduling & Productivity

Most restaurants cut down the cost of skilled labor and pay high wages to less productive employees. As a result, employees quit their jobs which lead to an imbalance in a number of workers in the restaurant and adversely affect the productivity of work.

Therefore, finding an employee with multi-tasking skills become a difficult task. Especially in the restaurant industry, it is important to hire a person who gets comfortable with multitasking. There are several tasks that a restaurant employee needs to perform, except the assigned one. Such as, a manager does distinct tasks on the regular basis, like assigning work to other employees, taking phone orders, making records, advertising, marketing, and so on. And, this is such a big issue as most of the employees feel difficult to perform all these tasks at the same time.

These are the major staffing problems that occur in almost every restaurant; big or small. So, it is important to overcome these issues to boost your business growth and profitability. Moreover, these problems directly raise the issue of staffing or labor shortage. But, here we have a solution for all these problems.

Like many other industries, Artificial Intelligence will play an important role in the restaurant industry to solve many of the existing staffing problems. We are already seeing the rise of Robot Chef to mitigate staffing shortage and bringing efficiency in this kitchen. Similarly, We will see the rise of AI-based assistant in the restaurant front desk and customer interaction related work.

Zume, a robotic pizza startup based in Silicon Valley is in talks with Softbank to raise $750M to automate Pizza baking. Similarly, Voix is leading the front to help restaurant owners to eliminate their staffing needs and cost by building AI Assistant for restaurant front desk.

Voix voice assistant converts existing phone line into an AI-powered voice assistant to allow restaurants to take order, book table or offer specials to the customer. As compared to traditional staffing, it saves on-boarding, training, and ongoing staffing costs because it provides quality of ordering using the AI. Voix powered restaurant front desk is an excellent way to keep your customers happy with no call hold time, and taking multiple orders at the same time and at the same time saving on staffing cost.