A new report from Nudge, a Toronto-based mobile platform for internal communications, that examined the state of the Canadian foodservice workforce found significant levels of dissatisfaction among hospitality and foodservice workers.
The study found that 40 per cent of foodservice workers don’t feel heard by their organizations and nearly the same proportion (38 per cent) want to quit their jobs. When asked why they would quit, the top three responses from foodservice desk-less workers were poor management, finding a job with better pay, and understaffing and burnout.
However, it did note that most foodservice operators are aware of this and would do more to help the situation if they could. Three-quarters (76 per cent) said they would invest part of their budget into employee experience in 2022. One-third (33 per cent) are planning to invest more into communication and one-quarter (25 per cent) are planning to invest more in feedback.
In addition, 25 per cent of operators cited turnover as their main challenge.
Additionally, operators indicated that knowledge retention and the inability to share real-time information are some of the biggest challenges contributing to the communication barrier between head offices and frontline workers.
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Meanwhile, over half (54 per cent) of foodservice staff said the communications they receive are only somewhat to not-at-all useful, which conflicts strikingly with the fact that a huge majority (94 per cent) of leaders feel they’re sending out meaningful, quality communications.
“The foodservice industry must adapt to rapidly changing employee needs or continue to see a negative impact on both revenue and customer experience,” said Jordan Ekers, COO of Nudge. “The impact of massive turnover and employee discontent coupled with the forces of The Great Resignation should spur foodservice operators to innovate, evolve and update their people management, feedback, and communications practices. To continue to ignore these undercurrents of change would mean being left behind.”
Read Nudge’s full The Deskless Report: Foodservice Edition here.
