A short talk about the costs of onboarding and the importance of intentional onboarding and positive workplace culture for staff retention in restaurants. The speaker cites a National Restaurant Association estimate (~$4,500) for average cost to onboard an employee and describes practical onboarding gestures (gift bag, personalized merch) to increase retention.
When you look at the time to onboard somebody, you look at the expense of training them. You look at are you paying a shift differential for a trainer to train them. You look at the error rate, the mistakes. Look at all the tasting, the sampling that you have to do with those people to eat their way through the menu. You look at the cost of their uniform that you're never going to be able to reuse once they've worn it, it's done, it's gone. So the average cost, according to the National Restaurant association in a survey that they had done, it's a couple years old. But I believe the number is still pretty true. I think it was around $4,500. And, I mean, I could send you this whole list, you could post it, and people can just put in all the answers to those questions. Divide whatever your wage is by how many hours a week you work, or whatever you think your hourly wage is, or your hourly wage of your leaders. You apply this to it, and you see really fast that this $4,500 is a real number. So when I talk about leading with culture and I talk about this, this intentional onboarding and this thoughtful way that we interview people, and then when they show up after they've gotten the job, we give them a nice little gift bag with the swag and the merch and the clothing and all the stuff with their name on it, their favorite candy inside the bag, all that is very, very intentional. Because here's what we know. A happy employee doesn't leave.
If your restaurant only works because you work 80 hours a week, it doesn't work.
