When you think of the costs associated with employee turnover, what comes to mind? When you’re trying to manage employees and mitigate the costs of turnover, some might seem obvious but there are many others that aren’t.
Employee turnover has many costs to your business. Here are four to think about:
1. Replacing Your Employees
Replacing a low-level team member in your restaurant costs on average about $1,700 to your business. Does that surprise you?
When you consider the time that it takes to post a job, interview people, hire them, train them, etc., it adds up quickly. And that’s only for an entry level employee! To hire a new team leader, it gets even higher and when you get to assistant managers or GMs, the cost can be devastating to your business.
2. Aggravating Your Customers
How many times have you been at a restaurant and two servers approach your table and you immediately thought, “Oh my gosh, the service is going to be slow today. They're training someone new?”
The second cost is that when you're training new staff, they have to practice on your customers, which can potentially aggravate them. Whether it’s because the service is slow or the order is wrong, that’s the risk you assume when you’re training new team members on the job.
Now, most people understand when someone's new. They want them to be successful and they're not trying to be aggravated, but it does change the dining experience. And after their training period and they're on their own, it takes them awhile to get settled into the job. And you're definitely practicing on your customers during that period.
3. Stressing Out Your Employees
When you’re hiring and training new team members, you're possibly stressing out your key employees. They might need to do a little extra while the new team member gets up to speed. And even once they're trained to complete tasks on their own, they're still not going to be as high-performing as some of your best team members. So, it’s not hard to see how they’d still be stressing out the key employees who will need to pick up the slack.
4. Slowing Business Improvement
When you have to take the time to hire, train, and get started with new employees, you're losing some of the ability to go to the next level because of the slower pace on the day to day operations. The new employee needs to learn of course, but it also slows down your operations.
For example, maybe you spent a lot of advertising money on a billboard trying to get new customers into your restaurant. They go in there and the experience is slow because you're training one or two new employees. Now your ROI that you would've got back from that advertisement is drastically cut.
It's a pretty sobering topic, which is why it’s so important to put the right processes and strategies into place. If you’re dealing with problems like these and aren’t sure how to mitigate the cost of employee turnover, check out our FREE resource, 6 Ways to Decrease Employee Turnover at Your Restaurant.
