Surprisingly Hotels & Restaurants who face constant complaints about slow service, unfriendly service, lack of service and the resulting loss in Sales frequently come to the same conclusion: There is no more good staff on the market! How many good staff did they themselves produce, train and therefore add valuable staff to the market? They normally don’t disclose. Shy of praising themselves.

Don’t train, don’t educate - just expect them somehow to pop up!

The only solution seems to be to hire more service staff when you need them and get rid of them fast when business is not that good. Hard to do with permanent employees. So the Hotel & Restaurant industry for decades now relies on part timers. Also Part timers need to be processed by the HR department, accounting has to administer them and pay wages and taxes, health checks have to be done and the value is limited.

They are part timers! They only care part time!

So the next logical step is outsourcing. Wonderful! You need five warm bodies for the service and two cleaners. Call the Agency, order them and the deal is done. No more HR and the only accounting you have to do is paying the invoice from the agency. Medical examination, interviews? That is not your problem anymore! Finally after all this years that it cost you to get rid of permanent employees that were your full responsibility you can also discharge this bothering lot of part timers that - besides being never good enough for you - also had to be administered. Now you finally can get staff from the shelf and put them back onto the same when you don’t need them anymore.

But what a disappointment when they show up! They are also humans! With your first order you will get the best ones. Which are only good - but still the best the Agency has to offer because you are the new client who has to be impressed. Soon you will find out that you don’t have much, if anything at all, to say who is being send to you. The best ones – which are only good - are often not available later on for you because they are busy impressing other new clients for the agency.

Don't give them more then you need

So if you train staff in the hotel & restaurant industry you only train them the skills and knowledge that they will need to function in your environment. You don’t train more because your business does not need it. If you train and develop them too much they might leave and get a better job. Or worse, they might want more money!

Of course you can’t take the responsibility for permanent staff, which cost more money, administration and lets you bother with maternity leave, sick leave and holidays and all this other nasty things that come with responsibility. This in turn also enables you to complain about irresponsible staff.

You save the money for the selection, background checks and interviews of staff and rightfully wonder why the agency sends staff that you would – never - ever – have hired.

You can’t trust this outsourced staff as you don’t know who they are and where they come from. You will hire more security! No need! Security was outsourced first! You can just order some more!

You advertise that hospitality is a “Human to Human” business. Than why do you think that humans are stored on shelves? It also disappoints you that your daily changing staff does not build long lasting guest relations that you promise on your webpage. Why not?

Your highly advertised guest experience includes besides marble, goose feather cushions, a loyalty card and golden water taps a never ending introduction of new staff who’s names – as an additional service – the guests don’t have to bother to remember as tomorrow there are new ones.

You embrace new technologies and apps which help tremendously in the operation and enables the guests to do a lot by themselves. That frees time for the staff to interact with the guest and provide personalized services that you advertise. It also made sense to you to reduce the headcount and payroll at the same time because the last thing you need is part timers and outsourced staff talking to your guests.

And on top of it you all agree with the Quote: “Don’t take care of your clients first. Take care of your employees and they will take care of you clients.”

You have figured it out! Outsource! The only way to go!