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Strategies to retain your top talent

Successful retention of employees drives greater skills levels across your business, as experienced hires become part of the fabric of your brand and pass their knowledge on to others. This can benefit employees at every level, with new hires also bringing insights to add to the shared skillset of more established people within your business, which in turn, feeds your workplace culture.

Photo of Claire Cuthbertson, Group HR Manager at Crerar Hotels

The longer you retain great people, the more you invest in their development, the more it benefits the business in return. We spoke to Claire Cuthbertson, Group HR Manager at Crerar Hotels, to hear all about her current retention challenges and what she is doing to combat them.

According to recent research from Fourth*, hospitality continues to have a high staff turnover rate – 5.7% of the entire workforce left in June 2022. This is reflective of the rate throughout 2022, which has had a high of 6.4% and a low of 5.4%. We asked Claire, what Crerar Hotels is doing to retain their people.

“It’s always been quite a challenge to recruit various positions within hospitality,” Claire told us. “For example, chefs have always been extremely difficult to find, but now it’s become clear that it’s not just chefs. Finding spa therapists is like trying to find a unicorn, they’re actually more difficult to recruit than chefs, which I never ever thought would be the case.”

Making work feel like home

“It’s not just about money, especially with Gen Z workers that we are working with at the moment. There’s a lot more that we have had to focus on such as flexibility,” she told us. “For example, shift patterns. Our therapists are based at one location but they travel around the hotels when there’s a business need for them to do so. To make it as attractive as possible for them, we’ve made available live-in accommodation, we built a brand-new live-in accommodation building specifically for this department to live and work, It’s very modern. I’m quite jealous myself actually.”

Claire explained that the spa therapists work very much like chefs. “They do work very hard, everybody works hard. But the type of work that they actually do can be quite strenuous.” The Crerar team created a system whereby the team work four days a week but get three days off. “They would work 10 hours a day, still 40 hours a week” Claire said, but that this shift pattern gives team members quality time to spend with loved ones and has proved very popular.

Mental Health and Wellbeing

Claire has been working hard on Crerar’s Wellbeing offering. “The entire mental health situation is so important,” Claire said. “I have actually implemented our mental health and wellbeing policy and attached to that to the occupational therapy that we provide our employees if need be.”

“Mental health is a huge problem. The situation has really increased,” Claire said. “I would say that based on statistics that I’ve learned through various seminars I’ve attended, people between the ages of 18 and 24 years of age are the most vulnerable.” Although Claire used this as a starting point, she has been given a lot of scope to create a company-wide wellbeing programme.

“We’ve got a wellbeing policy in place and available for everyone. We have had an employee who was suicidal, and we referred them for therapy through our program, which provided us with insightful and reasonable steps that we could take to try and help them.” Claire explained that this wasn’t a doctor’s report, but a more holistic approach to wellbeing. “The program provided support in layman’s terms to help our team member to improve their mental health and get back into work”.

Claire says that feedback has been very positive. “It’s not just a case of the business doing this because they don’t want high sickness and absence rates, it’s about supporting the team. 20 years ago, companies expected employees to leave their baggage at the door. It’s completely different today.”

Using benefits as a retention tool

Crerar use PerkBox. “We have an Employee of the Month award, and they get gifted £100,” Claire said, “and they can redeem it at any of the other retailers that are part of the scheme, of which there are many”.

Some of the other benefits include £250 towards driving lessons, plus, a pet bereavement day. So, if you sadly lose a pet, you are entitled to a paid day of leave. Claire said. “In addition, we are a dog friendly company, so any hotel you want to stay in, you can bring your dog and they’re very welcome.”

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    *Source: Fourth’s hospitality research (August 2022)

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