The Impact of Work-Life Balance on Hospitality Employee Retention

If you understand the importance of supporting work-life balance for your team, but just aren’t sure how, you aren’t alone. These tactics can help hospitality managers to engage and educate their employees, leading to better balance and long-term satisfaction in a hospitality role. 

1. Increase engagement with dedicated tools – Today’s technology can be extremely valuable when it comes to engaging your team. For example, you can use Harri’s communications platform to implement a special engagement program for new hires’ first 90 days. You can also use it to share important announcements or updates and to celebrate special milestones in an employee’s life. What better way to let your employee know that you hope they enjoy their honeymoon, than by sending them off with a personal message? 
2. Improve communication with colleagues – Properly communicating with your team is huge in making them feel valued and limiting frustration. Harri is a powerful tool that centralizes messaging and announcements and facilitates two-way conversations with your staff. Use it to set up group message channels that encourage collaboration and upload a variety of media. You can even create custom message groups or news feeds based on things like role, responsibility, or location. 
3. Be as flexible as the position allows – Flexibility might sound like a myth in the hospitality industry, but the truth is there is almost always some wiggle room to accommodate workers. What can you do to better help staff meet their unique needs and preferences? Sometimes, even simplifying the process of swapping shifts can go a long way. Enable your team’s autonomy with automatic, direct, or pick-up shift functionality for employees, and encourage them to use the TeamLive app to trade shifts on the go. It’s also a good idea to expand onboarding so that workers have an understanding of other roles that may interest them in the future, and see a career path that may be different from their current one. 
4. Simplify scheduling – Scheduling is certainly a pain point for a majority of hospitality workers. If you can streamline this process, you’ll have happier workers and more coverage. Harri’s intelligent employee scheduling platform accounts for all external and internal factors to create truly labor-efficient staff schedules. Managers can ​​automatically generate position-based, skill-based, or performance-based schedules, and build optimal shift structures that calculate predicted demand based on historical sales data, employee availability, local and federal labor laws, and other custom factors. This means employees are more likely to have a schedule that meets their needs, and they have more options when a shift won’t work for them. 
5. Lead by example and recognize work-life balance – If business leaders never take time for themselves and don’t model healthy behaviors, then they can’t expect their employees to. Do your best to demonstrate a good work-life balance by taking your regular breaks, leaving work on time, and prioritizing time off. If you do these things, your team will feel more comfortable doing the same. Make a point of being excited for people when they take time off for a vacation or downtime. You may also consider incentivizing strong performance with time-off-related rewards, such as an extra half-day or day of leave as a reward for for achieving monthly sales goals. Make commitments to help them have more personal time, and stick to them. 

Boosting your team’s work-life balance will pay dividends. Investing in the tools that make life easier for your staff is an investment in them – one that will keep with you for years to come. Make sure to follow Harri’s blog for more tips, trends, and tech advice specifically for the hospitality industry.