Resources

Fruitful Labor

Given the tight labor market and high cost of recruiting, it pays to create an environment where people want to work. Here are some tips for retaining good help.

The tight labor market forces bakers to take aggressive and often costly recruiting steps to attract the right kind of help to their bakeries. The longer you can keep good people in your bakery, the better payoff you'll get for your hiring dollar.

That goes for part time and summer jobs too. Even if you're using temporary people for less skilled work, it makes sense to stretch your recruiting investment beyond one season. Take student help. Do it right and there's no reason why the student you hire and train this summer can't come back every summer until he or she completes college. Here are some tips for making your bakery the kind of place employees want to return to.

• Take time to train -- A recent study found the most common reasons workers leave jobs is because they're asked to perform tasks they don't know how to do. Whether you hire someone to greet customers, fill displays or perform highly skilled baking functions, good training is worth the effort. Analyze the skills, interests and learning potential of each employee to identify ways to utilize their talents more fully, which leads to increased job satisfaction. Never set them up for failure by putting them in situations they aren't trained to handle.
• Foster loyalty with incentives -- Summer workers may not respond to contests and other long-term incentives they won't be around long enough to benefit from. Immediate perks -- like movie tickets or gift certificates at local stores -- may be more effective. Offer incentives based on how long employees stay. Or use them to reward people who return the following season.
• Pay wages that give employees a reason to stay -- Make sure your wages compare with other jobs that might lure your help away. You pay the money anyway. It's just a matter of whom you pay it to -- your employees in the form of wages, or your newspaper and suppliers in the form of hiring ads and product mistakes. Consider this: With the cost of one newspaper help-wanted ad in a large-circulation newspaper, you could pay an employee an extra dollar an hour for a few weeks. Add up the time and materials you lose due to waste, and you support the increased wage even longer.