How much staff is too much staff?
Hear me out. I know talking about cutting down on staff is a prickly issue. It’s people’s jobs, after all. But, is there something as too much staff? A few experiences over the past month had me thinking, can you be overstaffed? Can you have so many people that overall productivity just goes down the drain?
While it’s well known that understaffing can seriously negatively impact your staff morale and your bottom line, the hospitality industry also has to grapple with the negative implications of overstaffing. Overstaffing isn’t just the result of too many employees. It can also be the right amount of employees in the wrong place.
Spending some time in Kandy, I had to visit one of the newest and largest private hospitals there, as a relative was undergoing an operation. Walking to the pharmacy to buy some medication, I observed four members of staff behind the glass partition. I thought, with that many staff, it should be a swift affair. Boy was I wrong.
I had to present the prescription through a window in the glass partition, where a member of staff took it, and handed me a receipt. I had to then take this receipt all of two meters to the cashier’s window and make the payment. Once I received the payment made receipt, I had to take this back to the first window, wait for the staff member to return, and present it in order to receive my order. By now, there were two people patiently waiting behind me to present their prescriptions and go through the whole rigmarole.
Herein lies the rub – I noticed two more staff members in the pharmacy, doing nothing but chatting with each other. Surely, they could have served the customers in the queue that had formed – but no, they were engaged in a long lively jaw about heaven knows what.
The second incident also occurred in Kandy, at a famous takeaway joint on Peradeniya Road that specializes in all things rice. Having previously ordered via Pickme food, I was pleased with the quality, and while passing by, decided to get some food for dinner. I observed eight staff members on this busy evening, of which at least half appeared to be doing nothing more but providing conversation material for the other half while they worked. Being a busy evening, there were plenty of customers waiting, more arriving, and my order took 25 minutes. I also discovered that the outlet is a one-trick-pony, and I should have merely stuck to rice instead of ordering burgers. There’s material for another article right there, about why being a one-trick pony is not necessarily a good thing in hospitality.
Let’s not even get into the overstaffing at state sector establishments, where you’ll easily be irritated by the number of people doing nothing but twiddling their thumbs around their teacups and newspapers, while you wait for their attention.
The question is, are we hiring too much staff? Those of you who have visited developed countries will be all too familiar with how many hospitality establishments abroad work with a handful of people. Way back in 2013, on a family trip to London, we stayed at a small hotel where a lady and gent manned the reception, handled restaurant service plus fulfilled housekeeping requests. And no, there weren’t any delays. They were organized and efficient.
More staff does not necessarily mean an efficient operation. If there are too many people and too few tasks to do, each one will naturally expect someone else to handle it, and woefully little will get done.
In some cases though, overstaffing can be unavoidable. For example, a restaurant might have established that its waiters can provide a good level of service to its customers when attending to 3 tables simultaneously. If the restaurant regularly has an average 16 tables during each lunch, having 5 waiters technically means the restaurant is understaffed. However, having 5 servers’ means 4 of the tables will receive a diminished quality of service because they are being waited on by one server. The dilemma then is whether to have 6 servers or stay with five!
Ashraaq Wahab – Sales/Marketing and Technical Director Hospitality Sri Lanka, Automotive Journalist, Marketer, Writer and Photographer, who enjoys penning his thoughts, insights and ideas on a variety of topics
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