DEEP DIVE

The key to blue-collar

retention: Engage employees at

critical points

By Kathryn Moody
Published April 24, 2017

This feature is part of a series focused exclusively on employee

engagement. To view other posts in the series, check out the spotlight page.

I
t’s hard to make a business successful without employees to
work for it.

Ask any manager in the hospitality industry about the biggest

demons their business faces, and it’s likely they’ll all cite a similar
one: retention. Usually followed closely by pro tability.

As HR managers everywhere are painfully aware, the two go hand-

in-hand like bad news and sad weather. Even for industries with
notoriously high bene ts o erings, keeping young talent around for
longer than a year is a consistent budgeting challenge. Despite
studies showing that millennial attitudes aren’t wholly to blame for
the problem, poor engagement still plagues companies of all types.

The “new blue-collar” industries, such as foodservice and

hospitality, grapple with these problems on even bigger scales —
but that has led to some serious innovation in the space that could
inform how these industries improve engagement and retention
overall.

New technology is enabling employers to communicate with

employees faster and more reliably and develop innovative twists
on older tactics, like o ering free education to employees through
online courses and coaches.
For engagement to kick in, employers have to meet employee
needs in ways that resonate. Here’s how some companies are
trying to do that.

Making good HR policy matter

In the companies that are doing this right, HR has already moved
from the sidelines to the forefront of the business, Luke Fryer,
Founder of Harri, an online-enabled hospitality talent platform, told
HR Dive.

The reasons are two-fold. States that continue to push wage law
increases have spooked industry leaders, who consider the
potential costs “crippling” to their business, Fryer said. HR is being
called upon to manage talent pipelines in a more sustainable way.
Instead of being seen as a cost sink, HR is “mission critical” to pro t
generation.

But hospitality businesses also struggle against powerful

competitors and perceptions that they are a low-paid industry. In
some states, those competitors include marijuana businesses. As
one Bloomberg story succinctly put it: “Why work in a stressful
kitchen when you can make $22 an hour in a greenhouse?”

HR has to maximize the performance of the talent they still have,

with little funding left over to execute improvement plans. For many
businesses, that means looking internally to nd ways to e ciently
shore up holes in the pipeline — and there are few better ways to
do that than through internal development.

“Sustained ROI is in retention,” Rachel Carlson, CEO and co-founder

of Guild Education, told HR Dive. Her company provides education
solutions to employers as a bene t to add to their o erings.
“There’s a sizeable number of frontline employees who need help
going back to school who don’t have meaningful higher-ed
credentials.”

It’s not about just helping employees obtain a degree. It’s also
about getting them to stick around long enough to either recoup
the costs of originally hiring and training them or promote them into
management. The “commoditization” of the low wage job —
essentially, that you can nd one just about anywhere — makes it
paramount that employers nd a way to engage employees and
di erentiate themselves from the pack.

Communicating with employees how they want

To speak to employees, you have to know where they are getting

their information. In many cases, the easy assumption (mobile
phones or email) isn’t the correct one. Mobile devices are
ubiquitous among all generations, but not all employees want to be
communicated with on their personal device, Fryer said. And most
hospitality employees don't use email in signi cant numbers.

“If you want to ignore them and overrule the way they want to work,
they are just going to go work somewhere else,” Fryer said. “If you
don’t respect the way they want to be communicated with, you do
so at your own peril — as in you won’t open for lunch.”

To get around this, Harri communicates with employees when they

clock in — a moment all employees go through when they start
their shifts. Employees clock in through an iPad with an app that
has face recognition technology.

The messages have to be kept short, but it’s one way to keep in
touch with the employee base and remind them of important
events, such as bene ts enrollment.

Respecting the ways employees want to be communicated with

matters in the long run. An apropos adage might be, "an employee
for now is a customer for life."

Training them in a way they can access

That adage applies to bene ts perhaps most of all. Carlson is part

of a movement to make education an element of commonly o ered
bene ts programs, even to hourly workers — a shift in perspective
on a bene t most commonly associated with white-collar work.
For many white-collar programs, however, education bene ts
tended toward negative ROI with little impact on retention. In
programs aimed at blue-collar workers, retention needs to be at the
forefront of design. But that means reworking education bene ts
from simply a degree-funding program to one that allows
development to be guided by what the employee needs.

These educational opportunities blend custom degree programs

with speci c, job-applicable skills training. That way, employees
aren’t bogged down by a nebulous degree or too-speci c skill
development.

“At the front-line, it is a retention crisis. But for nding managers, it

is a skills shortage,” Carlson said. Learning programs akin to Guild
Education provide specialized skills training that gives employees
credentials they can carry to all jobs and give employers a
workforce that is both more present and more promotable.

Essentially: You are training your own workforce to ll your talent

gaps, encouraging them to stick around in the process.

A good experience at a company includes a vision for how to grow

while there, and that includes providing appropriate horizontal and
vertical pathways — even if that leads to the employee leaving the
company later on.

It’s all about resiliency

Hospitality, retail and other blue-collar industries are on the verge

of powerful change, thanks to a ballooning patchwork mess of state
regulation and transformative technology that could eliminate
chunks of the workforce through automation.

“The economic incentive to replace people with machines against

increasing wage rates is not a soft decision. It is an existential
decision," Fryer said.

But workers with leadership potential and strong soft skills will
always be needed, which is why talent pipelines need to ensure
engagement and retention are top priorities. Communicate with
employees. Let them see the paths they can take to develop their
own skills.

“They have to decide they want to spend on these bene ts,”

Carlson said of employers. “Understand the ROI. Know that it can
be a pro t center.”

The new blue-collar industries are resilient. But they will only
remain that way if they change their perspective on the hourly
workforce. Making choices based on retention and valuing
employees, even knowing they likely won’t stick with you forever,
will ensure a company has a fair shake at surviving in a world of
new regulation and strange new competition.