Restaurant industry explores ways to make jobs attractive

The owner of Solly’s Bagelry likes the idea of changing her company’s work schedule by introducing a four-day week of 10-hour shifts as a way to retain staff.

Leah Markovitch said like many food service businesses, her three retail stores and one manufacturing outlet are dealing with a labour shortage. For her bakery and delicatessen, it is the lack of bakers, servers and workers in the kitchen. She has had to cut back hours because of the difficulty in finding and keeping people.

“I know that some of the people who come work for me want to work two jobs or want more time with their families,” she said. “We may have lost people knowing that they have to work five days and they can’t quite make it work with their current situation.”

Another appeal of spreading a 40-hour work week over four days instead of five is people spend one less day commuting.

“I have noticed that people are looking for a work-life balance,” Markovitch said. “I will go back and speak with them whether they will like a four-day week.”

Markovitch was responding after a presentation Tuesday by the B.C. Restaurant and Food Services Association on how the industry can deal with the shortage of chefs and cooks in Metro Vancouver.

About 150 people heard the association present findings of a six-month study at the Italian Cultural Centre. The BCRFSA plans to present the study to the provincial government in mid-February.

Samantha Scholefield, project manager of the study, said the shortage of chefs and cooks isn’t only a Canadian problem. It is affecting most English-speaking countries, including New Zealand, Australia, the U.K. and U.S.

Instead of a single fix, the report suggested a number of initiatives. In addition to employers introducing a flexible work week, it also included recognizing the different way millennials (born between 1981 and 1997) view working and the workplace.

Scholefield said during focus groups with students, she found young workers want to chart a course for success from the moment they join a company.

“I asked the question to groups of students: How long do you want to stay in your first job when you leave university or college?” The answer was six months. “Not a single kid in any class wanted to stay longer than six months. Of course, my jaw dropped open.”

She asked what would convince them to stay 12 months. What met with universal approval was their employer sitting down with them on their first day on the job and talking about what they could do together.

“The reality is that they want to feel like they’re growing in this job and that they’re not just a warm body filling a cold space,” she said. “They want a coach, not a boss.”

Millennials aren’t the workforce of the future, she said, they are the workforce of the present. Today, she said, 50 per cent of the 174,200 people in the food industry in B.C. are millennials and the generation that comes after — Generation Z.

“They are huge influencers of food trends,” she said.

Just under 70 per cent of millennials take pictures of their food and post to social media before they eat.

“They eat with us all the time. They take photos of what they do. They want to be engaged in the food industry,” she said. “We need to make sure that what we do engages them.”