The revolving door
“A revolving door isn't a hiring problem. It's a retention problem wearing a hiring budget. The company that fills every seat isn't winning. The company nobody wants to leave, is.”
Simply said, there are two different kinds of employees. One: where the organisation is built up of many “trees” – steady, reliable and happy employees who aren’t going away (for sometime at least). The second type is the company supporting a continuously revolving door constantly spinning with people coming in through one door, and going out through the other.
Which one is yours?
Some level of staff turnaround might be a good thing. Bad as it may seem when employees quit and leave, what’s worse is when some quit and stay. To quit and stay means to have an apathetic attitude and demeanor at work. In any organization, there is absolutely no room for apathy. Not towards one’s role, the customers or the business overall.
Welcome to the revolving door of workplace culture.
Getting someone in the door is only the beginning. Employee retention, that age-old issue, is that all-to-real predicament. You’ve just filled the vacancies within your business, believing that you have hired the right people. They are on boarded, trained and appear to be nicely settling in…and they begin to leave – before they have made any significant impact. What one sees here is that a placement that doesn’t last isn’t really a placement! And this is now happening pretty regularly since of late. What’s happening?
A revolving door of employees usually means the real problem isn’t hiring, it’s keeping good people. Replacing workers is easy; fixing the culture that keeps pushing them out is the hard part. While salary, benefits, and career growth matter, one factor continues to push good people out of the door more than any other: culture.
Hold on…I agree with most of you that few words get used more loosely in hospitality than culture. "Culture" has become one of the most overused and hollow buzzwords in the hospitality industry. It is frequently thrown around by executives to mask systemic operational flaws or used as a superficial marketing band-aid to attract talent. Some confuse culture to mean perks (free meals, casual dress codes, or break room games). Others treat culture as a list of corporate values painted on a wall or printed in a training manual, rather than how managers actually treat their staff – especially when under pressure.
As the Baby Boomers begin retiring, employers, particularly those with a large workforce are paying increasingly close attention to recruitment, engagement, and learning and development issues all centered on slowing that revolving door. It matters even more for independent properties, which don’t have the bench depth of a larger brand - when a key leader leaves, the culture leaves with them.
True hospitality culture isn't a top-down mandate. It is the sum of the behaviors that leaders tolerate, reward, and model when things go wrong on the floor. Cultural fluency comes from being in the room, reading the signals, and managing both sides (customers and employees) in real time.
You can’t enforce culture if people don’t understand it.
Shafeek Wahab - Editor, Hospitality Sri Lanka, Consultant, Trainer, Motivational Speaker, Mystery Guest Auditor, Ex-Hotelier
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