Labor/Staffing

[JacksPizzaNH]

Curious how other pizzerias are faring with current staffing levels and retention.    We're still facing a severe shortage in rural NH, but how others are doing in metropolitan/different rural areas across the US?

[adamj]

Live Free or Die that's the labor model now!

Here in downtown San Francisco we are most certainly facing and industry altering labor shortage challenge. Even as a casual upscale eating establishment we have added mobile order & pay as an option for our guests. It is still a bit clumsy, we are training our team to act more is ambassador's versus order takers now. At least when we're down on teammates the guest doesn't suffer. Unfortunately I don't see the labor crisis improving anytime soon. Another reason to lean into the toast community and find out what best practices people have to share.  What have you been doing besides working more?

[JacksPizzaNH]

As serious as this topic is that Live Free or Die comment is just PRICELESS and so true right now!  We also went the mobile ordering route and got serious push back  from a number of our customers unfortunately. 

As for what we're doing, we've zeroed in on creating well defined and transparent advancement pathways for workers that start with onboarding and can take them from FOH to BOH to the office/back-end of our set of pizza shops where they can learn about small business management and ownership while receiving optional formal training if they commit to a long term growth pathway with us.      This is just one of many things we're doing, but it's been the most effective effort thus far.

[adamj · Accepted solution]

We stumbled lot with MO&P in the beginning. Many of our guests almost rejected it. But as our team got more comfortable with the way they explained it to the guest and the improvements made by toast we have found that are challenge guests have diminished to few and far between. In addition we always make tablets available for those guests who insist I'm not using their personal cell phones.  We still scan the QR code at the table, so it remains specific to them (and it gives us an opportunity to share more about why we moved to the paperless style). Additionally, I like to build for the future...not the past. 

Our average guest is ordering more, and drink orders of increased too. Both a significant plus to the business.

On the topic of cross-training teammates, and teaching how to earn more $$ through promotion, I could not agree with you more.  Maybe with enough pressure we could have TOAST build a training module that could be designed to meet each business' specific need through a simple AI Q&A session?  Clearly defined growth paths seem to be desired by the employee we are employing today.  In addition I believe in sharing the success and failures of the business openly in the interest of helping everybody learn what it takes to actually keep a restaurant running.

Our business actually did away with tips and moved to a living wage model if you care to learn more I would be happy to share.

Keep at it & Stay thirsty!

[pizzaplacesf]

The staffing shortage is horrible in San Francisco. We used to get multiple resumes a week now we can go a few weeks without any inquiries. Hope things bounce back for you.