Today I want to talk about employee engagement, and why that’s important. I’ve talked about sustainability, if you want to be sustainable you have got to get your staff on board.

If you’ve gone through the process, for instance if you’ve got a commercial kitchen if your not engaged with your staff, if they aren’t engaged with the process, what’s going to happen?

At the end of the shift you might just have 3 items to wash, you’ve given them to whoever is doing the pot wash. And they are there filling up the big deep sink, costing you all that hot water, and it’s not just the hot water and the cost of heating it, it’s the water itself.

There are parts of this planet that are very short of water, we are very lucky with the resources we have in this country.

But because they’re not engaged, they just fill it up, they’re not paying the bills, they’re not thinking about it.

So how do you get them engaged? And how do you measure that engagement?

We have a tool called employee engagement – it’s not our tool, but we use it with clients. It’s a way of doing quarterly anonymous surveys, sent out to all your staff, who fill it in and you get the numbers crunched for you.  We then provide advice on how to get them more engaged.

The cost of employee turnover in the hospitality industry in this country is £284m a year.

Just think of that £284m, if you could keep them engaged this would be reduced.

Why are these costs so high?

You’ve got the cost of advertising. You’ve got to find this new person, and there’s a skill shortage and you might have to advertise several times. You’ve got to interview this person, again you might have to interview several people.

If you give them the job, you’ve then got to spend time getting them used to the ethos of your business, you’ve got to mentor them with another member of staff so they know what they’re doing and how you like things done. And the chances are they will take several months to get up to the speed of the person that has left.

So if you want to measure it, get them engaged, then employee engagement through the multiplier tool is an excellent way of doing it. Its anonymous you can’t tell who wrote what, so they don’t have that fear of who said what and why.

But it gets them engaged and hopefully will reduce your staff turnover costs and keep your staff with you for a long time.