How to Reduce Attrition in Hotels, Hospitality and Care

When employee disengagement bites, attrition and absence usually follow.

In this article, our experts explain how you can improve employee retention by up to 17% in the hospitality industry by making the most of an employee recognition platform and reducing attrition.

Why is Attrition a Problem in Hospitality and Care?

Employee retention can be a problem in any workplace. But attrition is particularly bad for teams in hotels and hospitality. In a busy restaurant or hotel, every person counts. When someone skips out on a kitchen shift or abruptly leaves the cleaning team, it’s normally up to the remaining employees to stretch themselves thin plugging every gap, or for the company to spend a fortune drafting in agency staff.

The Solution to Reducing Attrition? Employee Recognition

Employee recognition plays a major role in boosting engagement, and therefore retention. But employee recognition isn’t something you can easily turn on with the flick of a switch. And when you look at the challenges faced at the HR, management and employee level, you can see why it takes a dedicated strategy to move the dial on recognition and retention.

How to Reduce Attrition in Hospitality and Care

Here’s a story you might be familiar with: An independent care home, perhaps family-run, is acquired by a chain – and immediately the care home implements a top-down efficiency mandate. New procedures come in, along with new managers. And the daily running of things becomes more regimented.

Employees have mixed feelings. The most ambitious team members might feel hopeful about furthering their careers, but many of the staff feel a little adrift. They no longer feel a sense of personal connection to their former bosses, some feel alienated from the corporate structure, and many feel their loyalty is no longer appreciated in the same way.

Recognition Is the Key to Unlocking Potential

A CEO of one of our customers recently found themselves in a very similar situation. His workforce was distributed across several number of previously independent companies. But they weren’t just distributed – they were fractured. Disillusioned.

It wasn’t like he hadn’t put in the work, but the improvement in attrition rates was modest. He’d spoken to his workers directly. He’d raised pay above the competitors in the area. But something was missing – and they still relied on too many expensive agency staff to fill in the gaps that employees left.

But what changed? This is where leveraging recognition made all the difference. He introduced Mo, an award-winning employee engagement software, alongside an effective strategy.

How to Activate Managers for Better Employee Performance

Are you an HR specialist struggling to activate your managers to improve overall employee performance and company culture?

We encounter this problem with customers across numerous industries, from hospitality to office-based organisations.

Getting the most out of your managers, who are often in the position reluctantly, can be difficult. That’s why we’ve created this easy-to-understand article that outlines how Mo’s platform can activate your managers for real results.

How Mo Improves Employee Attrition Rates

When the CEO introduced Mo’s employee recognition software to his workforce, Mo was seen as an extension of management. It gave managers who want to better connect with their full-time and part-time workforce a way to do so, and a way to make sure employees feel seen, valued and listened to.

This was a company where a voucher reward for hard work could make a real difference to someone’s week. It was also a huge leveller. Employees who’d been around for an age now felt recognised for their loyalty once again. Not only that, new starts could instantly connect to the company’s values and culture.

Mo Drives Real Impact On Morale and Loyalty

With Mo, the platform is only used for positive messaging, not for setting or checking on tasks. That means that when an employee sees they have a message from their manager on Mo, they can open it without worrying about whether they’ve done something wrong at work.

Here it was having a transformative effect on the mental health of the CEO’s teams. When employees didn’t fear messages from their manager or their peers, it created the psychological safety they needed to form stronger bonds and workplace friendships. Mo was ultimately making people’s relationships at work more fulfilling.

Attrition Plummeted Across Teams Who Use Mo

Using Mo meant expensive agency workers, who could raise costs by at least 50%, could be kept to a minimum. Mo is easily paying back the costs of both software and rewards.

How to Leverage Recognition to Improve Attrition

Step 1: Activate Frontline Managers and Their Teams

It’s worth spelling out how that one extra task on their plate isn’t just for the sake of it, or for the sake of gathering data that only makes HR’s life easier. It’s to target the root problem of understaffing that leaves them so stressed in the first place.

Here are some stats to support the use of employee recognition:

• If a manager is regularly recognising the contributions of their team, those team members can be up to 63% less likely to look for a new job elsewhere.
• Happy employees are also 12% more productive, making it easier for the manager to get things done themselves.

The same will go for every employee who is recognised by their peers. If you care about your team and know they care about you in return, you’re far less likely to want to let them down. For anyone who needs to cover the front desk on their lunch break because their burned-out junior employee hasn’t shown up for work, those numbers should more than justify the time spent shouting out great work.

Managers aren’t as concerned with the cost to the organisation. Every time an employee leaves or takes a shift off sick, someone has to fill the gap – and if agency staff are too expensive, that often means the manager has to fill it themselves or try to entice other employees into taking on extra shifts.

On paper, managers would bite your hand off if you offered them a way to slash the turnover rates in their teams. But as with their teams, in practice, they’re too busy to try out anything that won’t make a genuine, tangible difference. Overcoming those challenges is usually a matter of communication.

Step 2: Get Leadership Buy-In

Leadership is already concerned about mounting costs from dealing with attrition. Convincing them to invest in new employee recognition software can be an uphill battle. That’s why HR needs to pitch them the huge savings that lie behind investing in employee recognition software. Research by Oxford Economics and Unum says that the cost of hiring a new employee to replace one who’s left can account for more than £5,000.

That’s without factoring in the money spent on agency staff before hiring them. It also doesn’t factor in productivity lost while the new start goes through onboarding and training. We’ve written extensively on how to get leadership buy-in for employee recognition software.

When speaking to one of our experts, we will support you through the process of championing a recognition-rich culture to your leadership. We’re on your side from Day 1.

Step 3: Get Your Employees On Board

As part of potentially understaffed teams, they’re under massive stress and demand. Employees spend their day getting yelled at by guests because room checks are getting missed or the hash browns weren’t restocked at breakfast.

When head office emails and says they now have to start using a new employee recognition platform regularly, it’s going to feel like another task on their plate. That’s why making your employees part of the recognition journey is essential. Our Customer Success Team will support you through every step of your onboarding.

Recognition Is Proven to Positively Impact Attrition Rates

When the UK hospitality industry’s average turnover rate sits at 37.6%, a hotel chain with 500 employees could be looking at spending £940,000 every year just to replace lost employees.

When put against those numbers, the cost of an employee recognition and engagement platform is always going to save you more than you spend on it – especially if it leads to you slashing your attrition rate by 17%, as Atlas Hotels did when they introduced Mo to their teams.

Transform your culture with Mo

Book a free demo to learn how Mo can help you:

• 🤝 Improve employee engagement scores
• 🚀 Reduce employee churn
• 😍 Build a collaborative culture

Book your free demo

Mo Helps Your Industry Reduce Employee Attrition

If you’re looking for ways to move the dial on employee engagement and retention, take a look at our playbook for taking action after employee engagement surveys. Or to see how Mo can help deskless teams like yours build better bonds, accountability and a culture of celebrating value, check out our case studies.

Mo is a culture and engagement platform that uses data insights to drive real improvement in engagement scores while reducing staff turnover. We strategically help people teams create great places to work through continuous, positive action.

If you’re looking for ways to take action on measuring employee engagement, learn more about how to shift the dial at the manager level and transform insights into action. To find out if you’re eligible for our money-back guarantee, book a demo with our team.