How to Get and Keep Great Staff

Building and maintaining a skilled, motivated, and loyal team is one of the biggest challenges for any cafe or coffee shop owner.

The hospitality industry is notorious for high turnover rates, which can result in inconsistency in service, increased training costs, and decreased morale among remaining staff.

Today we aim to answer the question: “How to get and keep great staff” by offering a few actionable strategies for cafe and coffee shop owners.

Staff Recruitment

Let’s start at the beginning, where you have the greatest influence over the make up of your cafe business team – during recruitment.

Develop a Strong Employer Brand

Creating a strong employer brand is crucial in attracting top talent to your cafe or coffee shop. Your employer brand encompasses your business’s reputation and value proposition to employees. 

A well-defined message helps potential staff understand what makes your cafe a great place to work. Helping you to attract lots of candidates when you have a job vacancy; giving you more options when deciding which candidate will be a good fit. 

Key Employer Brand Concepts

• Define Your Unique Selling Points: Detail what sets your workplace apart.
  • Culture: Emphasize what’s great about the workplace culture you have (is it fun-loving and upbeat, is it sophisticated and highbrow, is it family friendly, is it hipster… what ‘vibe’ does your cafe have?).
  • Values: Highlight what you stand for – the values that are important to you and your team (these might be your commitment to quality, sustainability, community, honesty, affordability, integrity, etc).
• Utilize Social Media: Share aspects of your cafe that can make connections.
  • Share stories and/or testimonials from current employees about menu items, ingredients, local happenings, local weather, local traffic, new trends, daily specials, etc.
  • Post engaging content showcasing your team and their achievements. Especially industry recognition with awards, competition results, press releases or news coverage.
• Create Attractive Job Descriptions:
  • Clearly outline roles and responsibilities. Having clear boundaries around duties and tasks as well as making clear what types of decision-making authority they have helps candidates quickly evaluate whether they have the capabilities you are looking for.
  • Highlight growth opportunities and unique perks. From tips to supporting their lifestyle with flexible rosters, layout all the things you are able to offer in addition to their salary. That means you won’t be wasting time by interviewing people who want more than you can afford/offer.

Conduct Revealing Interviews 

A structured interview process will significantly improve your chances of hiring the right people. Revealing interviews help you assess not only the skills and experience of candidates but also how they fit into the team and culture of your cafe. 

Key Focus Areas 

• Standardise Your Interview Process: That means preparing a set of questions you ask every single candidate to ensure consistency.
  • Include behavioural questions to get insights into how they solved problems in the past and to predict what they would do in a similar situation in your business.
  • Have a ‘marking’ sheet where you can jot down notes on the candidates answers; and later give a number score for (to help in your evaluations process).
• Assess Cultural Fit: Whilst they may be nervous in an interview, you need to assess whether a candidate has personality traits that will fit in your team.
  • Include questions about the candidate’s values and attitudes toward customer service. You are looking for signs that they will adapt to your way of doing things, that they won’t bring personal life problems into the workplace and are confident without being cocky.
  • Evaluate their compatibility with your existing team. It might be tempting to employ an impressive ‘all-rounder’ candidate, but if that’s not what the role needs then you could be introducing someone that will cause conflicts. For example, a role that needs a detailed oriented person that gets filled by a candidate that is great at productivity ‘hacks’ will not only upset the balance of your team, they could also impact the quality of your products and customer service.
• Involve Your Team:
  • Have current staff participate in interviews to provide additional perspectives. Give the staff member a ‘marking’ sheet so that they can grade candidate answers in their own way. This will help you to have more meaningful conversations after interviewing when you’re assessing candidates together.

Hire Slow, Fire Fast 

If you’ve never heard the phrase ‘hire slow, fire fast’ then here’s a bit of explanation and how it applies to cafes and coffee shops. 

Laws affecting employees, their rights, workplace conditions and employer obligations mean that in many jurisdictions, individuals who do harm to your business can be difficult to exit out of your business. For this reason it can be devastating to a business when a new hire gets employed that doesn’t fit and stays. 

The idea of ‘hire slow’ is about being really thorough in the preparation, interview and after interview assessment processes. You want to avoid wherever possible being in a hurry or feeling forced to hire ‘the best candidate of a bad lot’. 

That means having absolute clarity about the role, and already having in mind your ideal employee to fill that role. In many cases you won’t get a 100% match to your ideal employee, but an 80 – 90% match is going to do a lot less damage than someone who is a 50% or lower match! 

The ‘fire fast’ part of the phrase comes in after you have hired someone that is not the right person. 

In the cafe industry few business owners have the luxury of being able to ‘train’ the wrong person into being the ideal employee. So if you’ve unfortunately found yourself in the situation where after 5 days (or however long you are willing to hurt your business and customers) your new hire isn’t working out, it’s time to get brave. You will need to reach out to the second best candidate, find out if they’re still available, get them lined up for coming in and fire the person who doesn’t fit. That’s what it means to ‘fire fast’. 

You ‘fire fast’ so you don’t have time to get ‘attached’ to this new employee or feel emotionally bad/guilty about ending their employment. The sooner you release them, the sooner they can find another job. By delaying making the decision or taking action you are effectively saying to the employee ‘how you behave, the way you work and your attitude’ is acceptable and welcomed here. 

As soon as you or anyone one in your team becomes aware of a problem with a new hire, you need to be getting yourself prepared for firing them. 

Important and Urgent for Hiring Slow and Firing Fast 

• Do Background Checks: Background checks on every candidate are important. Making sure all candidates being considered for employment have the same checks done, is essential.
  • Check candidate’s social media accounts for the types of political, religious or social opinions they might have. Look for ‘risky’ behaviours such as substance abuse, promiscuity or extreme sports that may impact attendance, or ‘bleed’ into team dynamics.
  • During interviews people always show their best side; hiding aspects of their personality that could matter when they’re under stress with customers or they become overly confident and self-assured. Checking that referees are real is important for understanding if there are any hidden risks to your business a particular candidate might unexpectedly bring with them.
• Multiple Interviews: Considering conducting multiple rounds of interviews. The more exposure to candidates you have before hiring, the more challenging it is for them to mask their intentions and hide their weaknesses.
  • Have more than one interview to check for any inconsistencies that might indicate deception, expose different attitudes based on increased confidence or reveal other traits such as tardiness, reliability, presentation or motivation.
  • Completing personality profile tests (DISC, MBTI and others) in additional interviews to help provide consistently collected data about candidates that is difficult to collect through interview questions. Giving you another source of information for assessing candidates.
• Processes and Documents: Having a workflow process for recruiting staff is essential for hiring great people. Knowing what to do and in what order means you or anyone else in your team can reliably find good people to employ.
  • Breaking the process down into steps and knowing what to do if a candidate passes or fails a step can take the pressure off whoever is responsible for that step in the process. Matching each pass/fail of the steps with an email, SMS or letter that goes out to the candidate, means you can automate that if you want. Streamlining your hiring and recruitment processes, while ensuring that you are consistently assessing every candidate.
  • Rejecting and firing people can be an emotional rollercoaster. By having carefully worded documents such as a telephone script you read out loud for a phone call or having a printed letter to hand to someone, can lift some of the anxiety of these situations. Documents and a process for these situations will prevent procrastination that might lead to keeping an employee who doesn’t fit, longer than you should.

Staff Onboarding Processes 

Create a Comprehensive Onboarding Program 

A well-thought-out onboarding process is essential for integrating new hires into your team. It helps them understand their roles, your expectations, and the culture of your cafe or coffee shop. 

In Australia there is a ‘probationary period’ to help businesses and employees evaluate each other before employment laws, responsibilities and obligations ‘kick in’ proper. You need to use this in your cafe business to your advantage, which is why having an onboarding process is important. 

You can think of the onboarding process as being a combination of few things, including training and evaluation. A well designed onboarding process will help you to find out really quickly if the new hire is a fit or someone to be fired. 

Key to Staff Onboarding 

• Training and Information: Not everyone learns the same way or at the same speed, so recognise that you may need to have several different ways of teaching new hires what and how to do things.
• On-the-job training where a team member shows the new hire what to do and then gets them to do it under supervision as well as alone. Is a traditional style of training for teaching new employees your way of doing things. The benefit of this is that if there’s going to be personality or challenges with hierarchy it will be picked up really quickly with this.
• Provide a training manual or handbook. Whether this is just one or two sheets of paper with diagrams and bullet-point/checklists or something more formal like a folder with tabs and colour coded sections. A handbook means you can communicate a lot more detail about the operations of your cafe business in ‘one hit’. It is important to note that the ‘right to switch off’ legislation in Australia means that you can not expect these types of documents to be read or referenced outside of work hours. Making these types of documents less effective for training, but useful for information sharing.
• Training videos are another way to teach new employees how to do specific tasks your way without tying up your other employees when you are busy. The ‘right to switch off’ legislation in Australia means that if you rely on training videos as part of your onboarding it may not be reasonable to expect them to be viewed outside of their work hours.
• Assign a Mentor: Having someone in your team chaperone and be responsible for a newly employed staff member can mean that fewer mistakes get made and the new hire becomes more confident and capable faster.
• For mentoring, it is important to choose a seasoned employee that demonstrates the attitudes and skills that you want your new employee to learn. The mentor also needs to be given permission to do less of their own tasks and be given the authority delegate to others when actively mentoring.
• Consider utilising the supervising responsibilities of mentors to assess and grade new employees. Having your mentors warn you when a new hire isn’t working out can help you avoid being stuck with people who hurt your business. Debriefing with a trusted employee about how a new person is working out can be a lot more open and honest than a check-in with a new hire.
• Regular Check-Ins:
• Schedule frequent meetings to assess progress and address concerns with your newly hired employee. This will help you understand where they are struggling to fit in, work at the required pace and meet KPIs you have for the role they are in. At the same time, but separately, speak with their assigned mentor to find out what challenges they are having and what observations they have. It is also handy to check-in with other employees to find out how they feel the new employee is going; even if they are not working closely with them yet.
• During onboarding check-ins (or at any time) it helps to have a checklist of tasks, behaviours and attitudes needed for the role, that you can score the new employee against. While these types of checklists, evaluations aren’t easily applied consistently, but they are helpful for providing constructive feedback and praise when milestones/targets are achieved. They can also help you determine the rate of improvement over time, give you a benchmark for assessing if a new hire is ‘measuring up’ or early warning that they aren’t a fit.

Employee Engagement 

Foster a Positive Work Environment 

Once you are seeing signs that the new employee is going to be an asset to your team. It’s time to look at what you can be doing to create a workplace where they want to stay. 

Employee engagement is vital for maintaining staff satisfaction and reducing turnover. A positive work environment where employees feel valued and heard encourages them to stay longer and perform better. 

Engaging Participation 

• Recognition and Rewards: These don’t need to be fancy plaques or trophy paperweights handed out to employees regularly; they can be simple things like public acknowledgement (such as at a team meeting or a social media post), printed paper certificates, donations to charity in their name or even a day of lighter duties.
  • Implement an employee of the month program. Where you have sub-teams, such as front-of-house, kitchen, baristas and back-of-house, consider rotating between these teams – for example in Jan the employee of the month is someone from the front-of-house team, then in Feb it would be someone from the kitchen, etc This style of recognition rotation prevents the one exceptional staff member in your team winning every single month (other than when they are on holidays).
  • Offer a variety of gifts, small rewards or bonuses for exceptional performance. The same certificate or reward can become stale quickly, causing regular winners to lose motivation over time. Mixing up what a winner receives/achieves can keep participation levels high once you’re into year two or three of these sorts of activities.
• Encourage Team Bonding: Different to team building, bonding is about having friendships and relationships based on respect amongst your team. The types of connections that last even after an employee moves on.
  • Organising social events outside of work is one of the most common ways team bonding is encouraged. Usually through pub nights, group dinners; and sometimes where employees can bring an invited guest. However there are lots of other types of social events that can bring your team together, such as events for charity (fun runs, raffles, tournaments etc), industry events (award dinners, product training sessions, documentary nights, etc), local community events (volunteering at school fetes, hosting networking events, being part of the cheer squad for a local sports team, tree planting, beach clean ups, morning tai chi/yoga/stretches in the park, etc) and all sorts of competitions (trivia nights, escape rooms, ugliest sweater/best costume days, cook-offs/invent a sandwich/smoothie/ice-cream sundae contests) and so much more.
  • Fostering a sense of community among staff members can be quite challenging, especially in cafes, where there is very little down-time during work hours. The trick here is about ‘artificially’ creating connections between team members who might not ordinarily have much to do with each other – such as between your book-keeper and kitchen-hand, or cleaner and barista. Doing things like randomly pairing staff up and giving them ‘research tasks’ to identify ways they can improve each others jobs, for example how could they reduce waste, reduce how long something takes to do or increase customer satisfaction in each others roles. The idea here is not to judge how useful or original their suggestions are, but create empathy and respect for each others work and tasks. Other ways to make connections include gratitude walls, anonymous gifting events (secret santa, valentines, singles day), secret locker notes (‘make me laugh’, ‘funniest OMG’, ‘cutest animal ooh’), recommendation charts (book, tv show, movie, game, holiday, gym, etc) and many more.
• Open Communication: This is 101 for any hospitality team and is the only way for a team working in a cafe to be efficient and customer service oriented. What you are after when it comes to open communication within your team is respect.
  • Hold regular team meetings to discuss operations and gather feedback from each other. This doesn’t mean being all ‘rah-rah’ and positivity. There are times when there are lots of problems that need to be solved. In these times of strife your team needs to be encouraged to be creative rather than feeling the need to ‘cover their arses’. You want them to help identify the source of a problem (without blaming or shaming) and have everyone on the team put forward suggestions (without bullying or demeaning) on how to fix it. It is also important that everyone gets roughly equal sharing time during team meetings. That means giving the person leading the meeting the authority to shut down people inclined to ‘over sharing’ and ‘drawing out’ those who are quietly shy or anxious about public speaking.
  • Cafe owners and managers need to keep an open-door policy for addressing issues promptly. Your team members should never be ‘afraid’ to speak up when they see or experience something that they believe is wrong happening in the cafe. It is important to ‘draw a line in the sand’ though; politics, family, personal and world events that have nothing to do with the running of the cafe should be identified as unacceptable topics for discussions with management.

Professional Development 

Provide Continuous Learning Opportunities 

Investing in your employees’ professional development not only enhances their skills but also demonstrates your dedication to their career growth. This can lead to higher job satisfaction and retention rates; even if it increases the risk of loosing them to a competitor. 

Basics for Continued Employee Development 

• Training Programs:
• Offer your staff barista training, customer service workshops, or advanced coffee-making courses. These could be internal or external and are great for improving skills, professionalism and confidence.
• Give your staff opportunities to attend live and virtual industry conferences, presentations and seminars. This makes your people brand ambassadors for your coffee shop and expands the network reach of your entire team.
• Career Advancement:
• In a cafe it can be difficult to create pathways for promotion, so you need to make it clear when there is none and help your employee find job satisfaction in other ways. Such as by giving employees leadership roles for specific initiatives, have them shadow or mentor other members, ask them to lead team meetings, give a speech to recognise a team mates excellence, etc.
• Allow employees to explore how they could introduce greater responsibilities into their own roles voluntarily (for example they may want to become a professional grade coffee machine cleaner, or try their hand at social media marketing, or collaborate in menu design).
• Educational Support:
• There are specific certifications your team may need, so it is important that the cafe pays for these in full. When you want your employees to really feel supported in these efforts, providing a small allowance to cover public transport, meals and snacks goes a long way to building loyalty. All other forms of career and professional development support can be encouraged, however the way you support your team member is going to come down to a negotiation. Some courses are long and cost tens of thousands, which may not be something your cafe business can financially afford or accommodate in your roster. When this is the case you must state your position clearly and let your employee know what an alternative option that could be support would be like (how much time away you can give them, how much you can afford to financially support).
• They say the best way to improve your knowledge and skills is to teach others. By having your team members lead training sessions, workshops and presentations you reinforce their own education and give them opportunities to gain new skills (teaching, presentation, planning, leadership). Whether they are educating fellow team members, running customer group activities or educational social events in the local community, as a cafe owner there are lots of ways you can support the professional growth your employees.

Actionable Checklist 

Right now, you are probably doing some of the above really well in your cafe business. Congratulations.

If you’ve gaps that need to be filled, then here’s a checklist of immediate actions you can take to get better at attracting and retaining great staff: 

Recruitment

• Define what your employer brand is.
• Come up with ideas for a social media campaign to showcase your workplace culture.
• Write clear and compelling job descriptions for each role in your cafe.
• Begin to map out your interview process and make a list of the documents you need.
• Assess what an ideal candidate needs for a cultural fit.
• Work out how you will involve your current team in the hiring process.

Onboarding

Document important information every employee needs into a handbook.

Identify which of your employees you would assign as mentors to new hires.

Come up with a list of things you need for check-ins in your onboarding process. 

Employee Engagement 

• Brainstorm what recognition and rewards systems would work for your cafe.
• Make a list of team-building activities you feel suit your employer brand and that your team might enjoy.
• Make a list of YouTube videos on how to lead team meetings, on improving communication skills, negotiating and conflict resolution to watch.

Professional Development 

• Identify useful learning and training programs for your employees to attend.
• Create opportunities for customer workshops and team skills sharing.
• Assess your cafe’s capacity for providing support for career development courses.

By investigating the suitability of these strategies for your coffee shop, you will be better positioned to attract and maintain a team of dedicated, skilled staff who can contribute to the long-term success of your cafe business.