F\u00e1ilte Ireland<\/a>, pathways to promotion and upskilling opportunities are now commonly under consideration in an adapting industry. <\/p>\nPart of a group of five restaurants, Market Lane in Cork always sought to be a good place to work. But still, management realised it was going to have to adapt to a changed jobs market as it fully reopened in the post-pandemic era. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe found that people\u2019s outlook and attitude towards work had changed,\u201d says Michelle Daniel, the company\u2019s head office coordinator. \u201cWe were getting people coming in saying they wanted the job, they wanted to get back into the workforce but they wanted to spend time with their families as well. <\/p>\n
\u201cMaybe before, someone would have been saying to them: \u2018Okay, you\u2019re available but you\u2019re not available, this is a restaurant and we need people to be available on a Saturday night,\u2019 but that attitude has changed.\u201d <\/p>\n
Daniel believes it is not just her group that has shifted its way of thinking, particularly among smaller, younger restaurants. <\/p>\n
\u201cI think we came to realise that if there was a way to make it work for the individual as well as the company then everybody was the better of it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The changed approach, she says, has meant more employees \u2013 about 200 now \u2013 working fewer hours, with a mix of other solutions, including more part-time servers and chefs who work longer shifts over just four days to get more time with their families.<\/p>\n
F\u00e1ilte Ireland says its online survey of almost 600 hospitality employers, and a similar number of workers, suggests Market Lane is not alone in trying to do things a little differently.<\/p>\n
Pay increases is the most commonly cited way in which businesses say they are trying to attract and retain staff, although it is unclear how many are going beyond the rising national minimum wage. About half (51 per cent) say they are offering more flexible work schedules while 39 per cent are providing more training or upskilling opportunities. A third are making more promotions available to those who see the sector as a long-term career.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we\u2019ve seen,\u201d says Daniel, herself a former front-of-house server, \u201cis that when people have that balance they are a lot more enthusiastic when they come to work. <\/p>\n
\u201cThey are not really tired from having to work long hours and when we talk about things like menu changes they have more ideas because maybe they\u2019ve had more time to go to other restaurants for meals or to try things at home. We definitely feel that by addressing that work-life balance issue, we are getting the best out of people.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, among staff it is not all positive \u2013 just over a third expressed the belief nothing has been done in their workplace to make things more attractive.<\/p>\n
F\u00e1ilte Ireland\u2019s head of economics Caeman Wall acknowledges pay remains an issue. But, he notes, far fewer employers are citing acute problems with the recruitment of skilled staff such as chefs compared to 2021 when the first such careers survey was carried out.<\/p>\n
[\u00a0Government to blame for hundreds of food businesses going under, restaurants sayOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\nF\u00e1ilte Ireland\u2019s head of sector development, Jenny De Saulles, says there are a lot of other significant jobs in tourism such as general manager, sales and marketing director, roles that pay over \u20ac100,000. <\/p>\n
\u201cTourism isn\u2019t only about being a waitress, a bar person, or being an accommodation assistant. Actually, tourism is for anyone.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With money tight in the hospitality sector there has been significant growth in the number of businesses looking…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":59082,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[79,18,4774,19,17],"class_list":{"0":"post-59081","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-eire","10":"tag-failte-ireland","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59081"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59081\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}