Staffing

The incredible shrinking restaurant labor pool

Restaurants of all ilk, including pizza brands, are hemorrhaging store- and area-level leadership.

Photo: iStock

September 3, 2020 by S.A. Whitehead — Food Editor, Net World Media Group

The restaurant industry really didn't need another vexing problem, but it's got one on the staffing front. Restaurants of all ilk, including pizza brands, are hemorrhaging leaders. EHS Hospitality Owner Bruce Faber said the pandemic has created two scenarios that are eating away at restaurant management.

The first involves the salaried store leader, who is burned out after picking up the responsibilties of laid off hourly workers.

"Sometimes brands basically kept the one or two salaried managers on and that salaried manager was responsible for everything from ordering the food and prepping and cooking it to doing the dishes. … They're getting a little burned out … and looking for an alternative to do something else or get out," Faber said in a recent interview with Pizza Marketplace. "The other piece is that they probably weren't making bonus even though they're working really hard because the concept, may be down 20, 30, 50, 70% in sales."

The second contributing situation involves workers who took time off after receiving stimulus checks. In many cases, Faber said they ended up getting a taste of of non-restaurant-working life — having nights and weekends off — and opted to get out of the business.

"So now what we're seeing is companies are calling us saying, 'Bruce, we need managers desperately,'" he said during an interview. "But there is truly a shrinking talent pool because we're seeing a lot of folks that were in the hospitality industry as 'lifers' … actually pivoting and changing their career paths. …

Problem has pre-pandemic roots

Even before the pandemic, Faber said there was an exodus of leadership. One major reason, he said, was that 30-something and under generations won't tolerate a lifestyle that impinges on their weekends, nights and opportunities for frequent travel.

Additionally, he said, many others in mid-level restaurant leadership — even with some tenure — were abandoning the industry after positions higher up the food chain at a brand failed to materialize. After all, the closer an employee is positioned to consideration for a vice presidency or other upper-level executive job, the fewer of those oppportunites remain at any one given brand.

But the end-result now — with the pandemic aggravations to this trend — is that pizza and other restaurant sectors are in dire need for managers and sous chefs nationally.

"It's not just about money anymore," Faber said. "Some companies pay very well and they throw out what I call the 'Golden Handcuffs,' where they pay extremely well and people can't afford to leave them — companies like Cheesecake Factory and Darden Restaurants and many others.

"But from what I'm seeing now, restaurateurs really need to look at, 'How can I offer quality of life?' Newer generations — the newer leaders — those millennials, they're not as inspired by the almighty dollar like, I'm a Baby Boomer and it was all about the dollar for me."

What today's restaurant leader does want

So what is it that these restaurant leaders-in-the-making want? Faber said it starts with a relatively guaranteed 40-hour work week and includes more flexibility than has been the chained-to-my-restaurant past of such industry jobs.

That means, in Faber's view, restaurants may evolve to a point where they are no longer there at all times for all meals for all people post-pandemic. But, that's just the start.

"Post-pandemic, we're going to see smaller menus. We're going to see less workforce … because of the shortage of the talent pool out there, and I think we'll also see the sizes of restaurants will be much smaller. …" he said.

There is certainly some good evidence of those predictions coming from brands like Taco Bell, with its Go Mobile model that downsized the average store size from 2,000, to 1,400 square feet per store.

"So they'll keep them small to keep the overheads low so they can run with even sometimes just an hourly manager and they might not even have to have a general manager for a lot of quick-service and fast casual restaurants," Faber said.

Is it us or is it them?

How exactly this issue will evolve remains speculative at best. What is not so hard to predict is the long- and widely known fact that some brands are just never going to retain leaders. They've simply got an unaddressed cultural or staff problem that they either don't see or won't address or both.

"People don't leave jobs, they leave the manager. ... Listen. Do exit interviews. Find out what the roadblocks are."

That's why Faber said it is more important than ever for pizza and other restaurant brands to take a good long ruthless look in the mirror. Does the brand perpetually suffer from a steady bleeding-off of leaders at any or all levels? Investigate now or lose later.

But self-evaluation is always tricky, whether for a person or a pizza business and it's rarely performed very well by those intimately connected to the brand. After all, when there's money, time, effort and, of course, passion invested in something, it's tough to see things clearly. But it couldn't be more essential to a brand's success.

"People don't leave jobs, they leave the manager, so make sure that you have that best general manager," Faber said, explaining that this role may be the truly most critical position in the creation and continuation of a great brand.

Toward that end, he stressed the value of measurement. Once a brand has identified a leader with the traits it wants, then communicated its expectations to that manager, measurement becomes a business's best friend.

If that manager's performance metrics are up to snuff, it's a good indication to continue along the same path with the same people. But, if not — and he said this is key — "make sure that it's not you," as in your company.

Culture, toxic employees, back-breaking workloads, or even clueless leadership are among the milliard reasons brands send quality hires hiking. But Faber said getting that objective, non-involved outside assessment of the situation and its cause begins outside the brand … at least for brands that want to see the true situation.

That means brands must use an outside party or survey system to get the current readout from your workforce about where the problems are.

"Listen. Do exit interviews. Find out what the roadblocks are," Faber said. "Sometimes it just might be an employee and has nothing to do with the manager. …

"In one of the companies (EHS Hospitality worked with), it was all about way too many hours. So, it didn't matter what kind of money they were paying them, nobody wants to do that. … And most of these are still great companies, but you don't realize until you really listen why people are leaving. … You can learn from that. "

About S.A. Whitehead

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Pizza Marketplace and QSRweb editor Shelly Whitehead is a former newspaper and TV reporter with an affinity for telling stories about the people and innovative thinking behind great brands.