Good Hospitality Workers Are Hard To Find

We're in a recession, and supposedly thousands of people are out of work, struggling to pay the bills. So you might expect that any employer who paid a decent wage and offered regular hours, especially tailored to the needs of the worker, would have no trouble finding help.

But it's not quite that simple in the "hospitality" industry, where hoteliers and restaurateurs say one of their biggest challenges is getting - and keeping - entry-level employees.

When Roth Young, an executive search company in Seattle, asked managers in 400 hospitality businesses in Washington, Oregon and Alaska earlier this year what positions were the hardest to fill at their hotels, restaurants and resorts, nearly two-thirds said the biggest problem is with hourly employees such as servers, dishwashers, housekeepers and hostesses.

These are not glamorous jobs. Cleaning a bathroom of a departed hotel guest "is certainly not a fun task," said Brian Rickert, general manager of the Edgewater, a 238-room hotel on Seattle's waterfront.

"The biggest challenge for the hotel industry in the 1990s probably will continue to be finding and holding on to good employees," Rickert said.

"It's tough competing (for hourly workers) with the shopping malls and the retail clothing stores," said Joe Fugere, district operations manager for 20 Taco Time restaurants in the Seattle area. "It's an image thing, and we are trying to overcome the image by providing a better work environment, by providing a uniform made of 100 percent cotton. And we concentrate on training."

"It is extremely difficult and getting more difficult daily" to hire entry-level workers, said Joe Terzi, general manager of one of Seattle's largest hotels, the Seattle Sheraton. "The supply is minimal and the demand is very high.

"We advertise almost weekly for a number of jobs in the hotel," which has 840 rooms and a work force that peaks at about 700 in the summer, Terzi said. "Most times, we get a fairly good response to some ads, but a lot of jobs remain unfilled," especially openings for housekeepers, dishwashers and busboys.

Dale White, director of the hospitality division at Roth Young, said a client at an upscale restaurant told him that "filling a position for a dishwasher and keeping him in the job is tougher than getting and keeping an executive chef. That says a lot about the industry." White said a dishwasher typically earns $5 to $6 an hour, an executive chef up to $50,000 a year.

When the jobs are filled, they don't stay filled. "The turnover ratio is much too high," Terzi said. Rickert said industrywide turnover is about 85 percent to 90 percent.

The Sheraton hotel hired about 30 housekeeping employees in May, about a third of the housekeeping staff. Of those, "probably 40 to 50 percent" won't make it through what Terzi calls "the qualifying period," at the end of which a worker should be performing up to the standards of the hotel.

Some can't meet the standards, some decide they don't want to, and still others leave for another opportunity.

"Unless an employer works really hard, hourly people will leave one company to go to another for as little as $1 more an hour," White said.

"That is true," said Fugere at Taco Time. "That is why you have to have the right work environment. One of our missions, if you want to call it that, is to create the ultimate work environment. That means taking care of our people, helping them find apartments if they need that, just being there for them."

At the Edgewater, Rickert said the recession has made at least a temporary dent in the problem.

"Because of the recession, things have eased up greatly," he said. "Last year, we had about 70 percent turnover. So far this year it's down to 15 percent. The people looking for jobs are much more qualified than they were a year ago, and many of them are not finding so many other job opportunities.

"Unfortunately, I don't think this will last for the long term," Rickert said. "It is a result of the recession. We in the industry are going to have to work on this for quite a few years, especially with all the growth that's expected in the industry in the next 10 years."

Entry-level jobs don't pay much. Starting pay at the Sheraton ranges from $6.25 to $6.50 an hour, with raises of 25 to 50 cents after an initial training period of 30 to 90 days. At the Edgewater, pay starts at $4.50.

"Money still talks a lot," White said. "In fact, in this industry it screams."

Limited in what they can pay hourly workers, employers have found various creative approaches to attracting and keeping workers.

"The whole thing is job satisfaction," White said. "If the employee feels that, it will mean more than money. Otherwise, they will move on. This is a very transitory industry."

He said the most important perks for hourly employees are flexible schedules, medical benefits and "participatory management."

-- At the Edgewater, "because we are open 24 hours a day and seven days a week, we are very flexible on work schedules and days of work," Rickert said. "For people with children in school, we have shifts that start at 9 a.m. and end at 2 p.m. If somebody wants to work just on Tuesday and Thursday nights, we can do that. We can tailor a work schedule to anybody's needs."

-- Medical benefits are still the exception, according to the Roth Young survey. Only 37 percent of employers said they provide paid medical plans. But White said more and more hourly positions are becoming eligible for such benefits.

-- What White calls participatory management takes various forms. "It used to be that when an employer implemented a new policy about hours or something else, you simply announced what you were going to do," White said. "But now they are saying, even to hourly people, `You tell us when you want to work.' "

Employees, even those on the low end of the pay scale, are being consulted more these days on subjects such as physical arrangements and furnishings of work spaces and about how various jobs can be done more efficiently.

Employers have found other benefits to pass out.

Free ("nonpaid," in the industry jargon) meals are common at hotels and restaurants. Some also pass out nontraditional perks such as memberships in health clubs and athletic facilities and help with school tuition.

Sometimes it requires imagination to supply an hourly worker with job satisfaction.

Cleaning the bathroom of a vacant hotel room "is certainly not a fun task," Rickert said. "But leaving a sparkling clean room for the incoming guest, with a card saying the room has been cleaned by Jane Doe, is a very satisfying experience. They can walk out of that room and take a real sense of pride."

Rickert also believes in positive feedback, especially from guests. "Any time we get any positive feedback from our guests about what some employee did for them, we make a real effort to get that message back to the employee. That kind of immediate gratification is very important, and there is a lot of it in our business."

Fugere says Taco Time has been successfully recruiting through word of mouth. "We are a family company, and we have an orientation program to tell new employees about the family and how we treat our customers and how we treat our employees."

The Sheraton goes further in its word-of-mouth program. "Any employee who refers anyone who we hire receives a $10 cash award when they are hired," Terzi said. If the new employee is still on the job after six months, the referring employee gets $75 more.

The Sheraton also contracts with Northwest Center Industries, a Seattle job-training agency, to supply disabled workers for kitchen duties such as maintenance and dishwashing.

The organization brings the workers to the hotel and supervises them on the job, letting them "earn a living that they would probably not have elsewhere," Terzi said. "This has been very successful for the hotel."

Some employers teach English as a second language.

"We have given those classes free to about 20 people right at the hotel," Terzi said. "This gives them something they did not have otherwise, and we had a very positive response to that.

"Quite honestly, I think a lot of those people are potential candidates for advancement because of it," Terzi said.

Advancement is one of the strong lures in the hotel and restaurant industries.

"One of the benefits of our business is we will take somebody without hotel experience, and we offer lots of opportunities to start in many places: on the telephone, at the front desk, as a concierge, in the restaurant or in housekeeping," Rickert said.

"If they have good people skills and good communication skills, we can train them to do almost any job in the hotel," he said. "We always like to promote from within, so there are lots of career opportunities.

"And once you learn the hotel business, you can go anyplace in the world and work in the hotel business. It is very similar, anywhere you want to go," Rickert said.

Rapid growth at some fast-food chains has created ample opportunity for promotion.

"Hourly employees in those places find it easier to move up into management," White said. "You are more visible, and if you do good work it is noticed very quickly. Usually the fast-food places have very good training programs, and in some cases they are leading the industry.

"And the growth is happening so fast that some employers have trouble keeping up with it," he said. "At McDonald's, they open up a new restaurant somewhere in the world every 17 hours. The advancement comes much quicker in that kind of environment than elsewhere in the industry."

Some workers find long-term rewards without seeking promotions.

"A lot of people find there is money to be made in the industry if they stick with it," said Rick Hall, managing director for Local 8 of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union.

"I know bellmen who have been at it for 25 or 30 years, and they live comfortably," Hall said.

Still, the pressure is on for many entry-level workers in hotels, resorts restaurants and other hospitality establishments.

"With the recession, a lot of people on the outside would think that there would be plenty of people willing to take these jobs, but there are not," White said.

Many hourly workers "don't feel like they are being treated well, and they don't see the growth opportunities," he said. "In some cases, these are the most overworked and mistreated people in the industry. So it is sometimes surprising to me to hear employers complain about the trouble they have keeping people in these jobs."