Retaining Staff

You’ve hired staff, trained them, and put them on the schedule – your work is done. Or is it? As the owners of two bars, we’re here to fill you in on a secret: it’s significantly easier to retain great employees than it is to hire and train new ones. That being said, creating an environment that fosters professional and personal development, provides excellent compensation, and allows employees to take ownership of the bar does require work on the part of ownership. While it seems transactional, providing employees with a generous pay and benefits package makes it difficult for another job to lure them away with higher pay and more benefits. Several of the benefits that we offer happen on an annual or semiannual basis, such as group and individual all-expense-paid trips, which provide an incentive for staff to stay longer while also providing a scheduled respite and time to reset.

Many studies have shown that bad management is the number one reason why people leave jobs, which is why we’ve strived to create policies and a corporate culture in which our management team leads with empathy and kindness. Our written mutual respect policy, which both management and employees sign, codifies how staff and management speak to each other – and sets out guidelines for how to approach situations when this policy is breached. Additionally, we maintain an open-door policy with management, in which management vows to make every attempt to make time immediately to discuss employee concerns in a confidential discussion. We work with our management team to discuss communication methods that are driven by empathy and trust and make sure that the words, tone, and phrasing we use with staff are encouraging, calm, and positive.

While we’re a mom-and-pop business, we took a page from our past corporate jobs by implementing a program of quarterly peer reviews, in which we have a scheduled one-hour meeting with each employee every 3 months to discuss opportunities for growth, offer constructive criticism, and discuss their goals for the next year. We maintain a confidential set of notes for each session, which we revisit in subsequent meetings to see how each member of our staff has grown in the past 90 days.

Quarterly meetings are often when employees interested in managerial roles first broach the subject with our management team. We are big believers on the idea of promoting from within, which helps our employees grow into new roles and gain new skills. While we are very involved as owners, we encourage our managerial team to make the bars their own; we want them to feel autonomous yet supported in their work.

For staff that aren’t interested in moving into managerial roles, we like to make sure that they continue to learn and develop as bar professionals as well. We keep things interesting for everyone by having all our employees work at both our bars (one is a cocktail bar and one is a five-star dive bar) in order to develop new and different skill sets, have new experiences, and problem solve different scenarios. We focus on continuing their education through weekly mandatory educational sessions, as well as by offering an unlimited educational reimbursement – we reimburse the cost of attending and traveling to educational experiences. Finally, we take the staff on optional weekly group team-building activities that do not involve the bar industry to foster staff bonding and friendships within the company.