Equip Your Restaurant Employees With Tools to Keep Them Engaged & Working Efficiently

Recruitment and retention is the restaurant industry’s perennial problem, with more than half of respondents to a 2017 Nation’s Restaurant News Operators Survey identifying “recruiting and retaining workers” as their biggest challenge heading into 2017.

Indeed, labor costs across the board – recruitment, rising wages, etc. – remain major concerns.

If you’re recruiting, you’re probably working with Millennials, given that more than one-in-three American workers today are Millennials, according to the Pew Research Center.

Obviously, there’s some danger in over-generalization, but as analysts at Gartner write, “Like all generations, millennials are made up of a diverse group of individuals with different preferences and opinions. However, when considered as an aggregate group, millennials are distinct from older coworkers. Understanding how millennials interact with technology is useful when selecting devices and designing workplace policies.”

And according to a PwC study of Millennials from 75 countries, this generation has specific expectations and desires about workplace technology:

• 59% of those surveyed said an employer’s provision of state-of-the art technology was important to them when considering a job.

• 78% said access to the technology they like to use makes them more effective at work.

They aren’t kidding. A 2016 survey from Bank of America found that nearly half (40%) of Millennials say they interact more with their smartphones than they do with significant others, parents, friends, children or co-workers.

In other words, equipping Millennials with today’s technology is a double-whammy of operational effectiveness. It increases the likelihood of successful recruitment, and it makes them better at the work they do.

If you already equip everyone at the top levels of the organization with the best, fastest computers, phones or tablets needed to get their jobs done, you might consider applying the same approach with your other employees as well. Put a tablet in their hand to complete checklists, or a Bluetooth probe to monitor temperatures, and you could end up with happy workers who do their jobs quickly and effectively, and stay in your organization longer.

Read more about restaurant recruiting and technology, or contact ComplianceMate with questions.