BW Hotelier spoke with Bakshish Dean, hospitality industry veteran and currently the Executive Director of Prime Gourmet, which owns and operates Johnny Rockets in India about the issues surrounding training and staff retention in hospitality as a whole.

Photo Credit : Bikramjit Ray,

"STAFFING IS one of the biggest issues that we (as an industry) is facing as of now, not only in the hotels, but in the restaurant space as well," Dean began by telling us.

"Though staff is available, but the quality staff that you want who is trained properly, is in short supply, so this is a huge challenge," he said adding that someone needs to take on this task. Professional and educational institutes need to approach the industry and develop meaningful partnerships to increase the quality of trained persons, he added.

Dean thought many of these institutes which churned out hospitality trained persons were not thorough with their teaching. "There is a big gap between what is taught and what is needed. Even if the curriculum in certain institutes have been modernised, execution is still poor, the people who are training and imparting education don't always have enough industry exposure at times," he added.

The need of the hour was for the institutes and training facilities to constantly evolve their curriculum so that whatever is happening in the industry is taught to the students, he felt.

"Definitely the security of a hotel job is far more than the security that you get at a standalone restaurant. Looking at how Johnny Rockets has evolved over the years and the practices they have put in place to be able to retain a lot of employees, we have studied these and implemented some," Dean said, when asked about specific challenges of his business and what he was doing about it.

"We empower the employee. We treat them like family and empower them to take a call when they are interacting with guests because they are a point of contact," he added. The staff turnover in his company hovers around 28 to 30 percent compared to an industry average of around 60 percent, he stated.

The whole concept of the business was about partnership. The partnership of the restaurant manager with his employees and their partnership with guests, he explained. "The whole thing comes down to delivery. There is accountability for every responsibility that is given to you," he added.

The attitude of the employee has to be right, Dean clarified, "I can teach them, we want them to do what we want them to do, not deliver what they have learned."

The company has a six-week training program when they are trained and retrained before being put on the floor.

"We are seriously also looking at the part time staffing path, because companies like McDonalds and KFC have very successfully gone down that route," he said, adding, "now that we have completed three years and people know us well, we have started to seriously look at it (part time staffing) and very soon, you will start seeing part timers in our systems."

"With the way the hospitality industry is expanding and QSRs are reaching out to smaller cities, very soon we will have to have a format where certain basics would have to be built into institutes which train QSR specific staff, which is also a huge need of the hour," he said, concluding by saying the biggest difference that he saw between working in hotels and in a place like Johnny Rockets was that the QSRs benchmarks are far higher when it comes to food safety, hygiene and customer service.