By Christina Lundin
Successful businesses often run smoothly because of the support that back-of-house (BOH) employees offer. Though often in the background, BOH staff plays an important role in your success, and if your BOH turnover rates are high, it can be hard to achieve your business goals.
Keeping every BOH worker engaged and motivated is a crucial part of strengthening your retention rates and reducing turnover. Here is a mix of incentives for employee retention to keep your BOH workers happy.
Top Employee Retention Incentives to Keep BOH Staff Passionate About Their Position
BOH staff help to keep the hospitality industry running, and these employee incentives can keep them even longer!
Implementing employee incentives is a great way to retain BOH staff, increase their productivity, and keep them motivated. Image courtesy of POS USA.
The hospitality industry can be a challenging one where it’s fairly often to see many staff members come and go for a multitude of reasons. Whether they’re progressing in the field or even leaving the industry, sometimes retaining hard-working employees can be difficult. Luckily, there are many employee retention tactics and incentives that can influence staff to stay and even be the change that reignites their passion for their love of the hospitality industry.
Non-Monetary Retention Strategies to Keep Your BOH Employees Motivated
Developing a range of retention strategies is important for maintaining employee engagement levels even when monetary incentives are not possible. Non-monetary incentives for BOH employees can be equally as rewarding and can create opportunities in ways that monetary incentives cannot.
Efforts to create a healthy workplace culture, support employees and recognize hard work can go a long way in creating lasting relationships with your employees. For many, these workplace qualities are reason enough to stick around. For some, the added benefits of performance bonuses and raises are more important.
In all likelihood, motivating and engaging your BOH employees will be best achieved by a combination of monetary and non-monetary incentives.
On-the-Job Training Incentives for Employees
One of the simplest ways to increase engagement and motivation in your BOH employees is to offer opportunities to add new skills and experiences to their repertoire. In most cases, this comes in the form of on-the-job training programs.
On-the-job training programs, as the name suggests, are programs designed to either train employees in new skills or add to existing skill sets. This can come in the form of job shadowing, mentorship and other formal training strategies.
Opportunities for growth or shadowing show the possibility of advancement opportunities, which can prevent feelings of stagnation. These opportunities show that management has faith in the performance of their employees and that they are invested in the continued development of staff.
An efficient way to provide or enhance on-the-job training is through the use of digital signage and back-of-house TVs. With Shift, you can display training information including videos and graphics on the existing screens, allowing your employees to easily access information without needing to step away from their day-to-day work.
Feedback and Communication-Based Employee Incentives
Showing your staff that you care about their needs is an important part of making them feel like a part of your team.
Creating employee surveys that gather feedback about pain points or procedural questions bridges gaps between employees and management. This affirms an environment of support and encourages two-way communication.
It’s important that these opportunities exist consistently and are easily accessible. One of the easiest ways to do this is with online surveys that BOH staff can access any time. Shift makes it easy to create QR code campaigns and display content that can be formatted into mobile landing pages, so that staff can scan codes and complete surveys on the go.
This is also an easy tool to use so that staff can share their thoughts and ideas and shout each other out.
Team-Based Performance Incentive Programs for Employees
Friendly competition and team-based challenges are great strategies for boosting employee engagement and retention.
Creating goals for teams to meet, like sales goals, training completion or patron survey competitions create a culture of teamwork and can reignite a dedication to performance. Coupling these efforts with meaningful incentives is the most efficient way to do this.
These incentives can come in many forms, including pay bonuses, extra vacation days or extra break time. Meaningful incentives will help increase employee motivation and engagement in the workplace and give your BOH employees a reason to strive for excellence in their day-to-day work routines.
Because performance-based incentives almost always revolve around meeting or exceeding goals tied to your business, it’s important to be able to monitor and record exactly how those goals are being met by each employee. Shift is able to connect and integrate with existing Point Of Sale (POS) systems to make tracking employee performance easy and effective.
Content scheduling on digital displays makes it easy to share stats for each of your shifts and across all locations so that all of your team members can get in on the fun!
Recognition and Appreciation Opportunities for BOH employees
While performance incentives are common, creating a culture of support goes beyond thinking about employee performance. Appreciation and recognition for what team members contribute are important, and it’s crucial to consider what BOH employees bring to the table beyond just their work.
Staff recognition often takes the form of recognizing personal accomplishments or hard work, such as consistently positive customer feedback or high task completion rates. It can also celebrate interpersonal qualities, like positive attitudes, integrity and problem-solving skills that keep shifts running smoothly.
Showing your team members they are valued takes very little effort, but can make a huge difference! Plus, don’t forget to make room for some small celebrations.
Ask your BOH employees to share their favorite dessert and some personal facts that you can use to celebrate birthdays and performance milestones. You can even couple this with a display. It’ll bring your BOH staff closer together and show how much you appreciate them.
Get FOH and BOH Staff to Efficiently Work Together
Front of house (FOH) and BOH staff can sometimes be difficult to cohesively work together due to the different types of work that they are doing, but this is crucial to boost BOH workers morale. Upping the communication and culture of both teams is essential and being open to communication can help start a discussion and sort out any issues. It can also create empathy, start cross-training and shadowing, and ultimately help to align the company goals between both teams and strive for success.
There are many different ways that you can go about getting both teams to work together and establish more communication by having daily briefings, creating a space to give feedback on both ends, remaining respectful, or even hiring food runners that can go back and forth to be a link between both teams. At the end of the day, both FOH and BOH teams should come together with their shared goals of the business that they are working for, and celebrate each other’s successes and work together to bring customers an experience that they’ll never forget.
How Shift Can Help You Boost Employee Motivation With Incentives
Using dynamic displays to feature non-monetary incentives for employee retention is a simple way to retain employees long-term!
Shift helps increase employee engagement in the hospitality industry, which can help prevent burnout among staff.
Content management systems are a great way to engage employees, recognize them for their hard work, and further develop connections with them. Shift is a powerful CMS and employee engagement system that allows its users to create diverse content, along with editing it and displaying it on digital signage–and even allowing for real-time updates that can be done remotely from a mobile device, tablet, or a laptop.
Learning More About Shift and How it Helps Employee Retention
Shift not only integrates directly with existing hardware and software within your business, but it also comes with full integration and support for creation and design tools. It features full in-app Canva integration which uses a simple drag-and-drop interface filled with customizable premade templates.
Shift also supports multiple file types and extensions, so you can incorporate your own branding and training content on your displays. These features and the flexibility they offer can be used to make non-monetary incentives for employees more attractive and alluring.
Once you’ve finished creating your content, you can then organize and display them across multiple screens, even changing the presentation on a micro level so the appropriate messaging reaches employees in the right shifts at different locations.
This makes it easy to keep messaging and programs consistent across multiple aspects of your non-monetary retention strategies, as well as all the screens you may have at different locations of your premises.
Offers Integration and Analytics to Track Retention Incentives
Even the greatest training program or the best employee incentive program will be next to useless unless you track and analyze the effect they have on your staff. This is why Shift integrates with some POS systems, like Aloha, to track key performance metrics. This makes it easy to understand just how successful your various employee incentive ideas are in increasing employee retention and reducing BOH staff turnover.
From there, it’s easy to target areas of improvement and adjust retention strategies. Coupled with employee feedback, this makes for a foolproof system that is sure to see results.
Other Beneficial Features that Shift Can Offer Any Hospitality Business
There are many reasons why so many popular hospitality businesses, including restaurants and hotels. Not only can they help increase employee engagement, but so much more! Other benefits of using the CMS software application including the following:
- Boost employee engagement through recognition and appreciation
- Celebrate staff birthdays, work anniversaries, and other achievements
- Show training videos
- Employee spotlights
- Interactive polls for staff to anonymously complete
- Expands internal communications
- Allows staff to retrain and re-skill in key trainings
- Helps leaders learn more about staff
- Encourages employees to do work harder
- Increases productivity
See How Shift Can Help You Activate Your BOH Employee Incentive Programs
Ready to start putting in place rewards and incentives for your BOH employees and reducing your turnover rate? You need the right kind of platform to bring your incentive plans for your employees to life.
Shift is the leading digital signage solution industry leaders trust to keep their employees engaged. Find out how Shift can help you keep your BOH workers happy with a risk-free demo today!
