“I’m sorry for the wait, it’ll be another twenty minutes or so. I’m sorry; we’re understaffed.”
I felt bad for the young hostess, and wondered how many times she felt compelled (or was told) to say that. We were looking forward to having some fresh seafood at this Tampa-area restaurant that we’d heard good things about, but the wait time had gone from the initial 30-40 minutes to “another twenty minutes or so” to past that and counting. We ended up being seated after about an hour and fifteen minutes.
Each of the three or four times I asked for an update, the “understaffed” apology was included in the new information. Why?
I’m sure you’ve either followed the news about the extra level of federal and state unemployment benefits, or heard stories such as the one above, or experienced it yourself. As of June 2021, there are millions of job openings around the country, but a similar number of people remaining unemployed. In some cases, the extra unemployment benefit equals or exceeds the amount people could earn given their industry experience and skill level! Thus, the help that was so crucial to make ends meet for millions of families has become a disincentive to going back to work. The result is understaffing, closed businesses that cannot hire enough staff to reopen, and many other negative consequences.
Countering the policies are businesses that are trying to use incentives to lure people to apply for their languishing job openings. As you’ve traveled around over the past few months, you’ve probably seen signs in store windows, in front of restaurants, and in many other places, offering signing bonuses for new hires. In addition to that private sector response, several states have ended their own extra unemployment benefit that had supplemented the federal ones.
Providing incentives that encourage desired behaviors, and disincentives for behaviors that are not, do not have to involve paying people more money. Enhancing the worksite environment, providing opportunities to improve skills and knowledge, and making sure the value the organization seeks to provide for its customers is understood by everyone are all ways to incentivize positive behaviors. Unfortunately, this also applies to disincentives.
In the early 1980s, just after I graduated from college, I worked as an assistant manager at a shoe store in Lexington, Kentucky. This store was a unit of one of the retail chains operated by a large shoe manufacturer. In my training I was taught that we could call other stores to see if they had a size and style of a shoe in stock when we did not and a customer wanted it. One day early in my time there that exact situation occurred; a customer wanted a particularly expensive style and we were out of his size. On this day, our regional manager happened to be in our store, as he made rounds of stores in our district (Kentucky and Indiana). I called one of our stores in Louisville, which was the closest location to ours. They didn’t have the shoe either. Later that day, I tried again with a second Louisville store. A few seconds later I heard the voice of my regional manager, who had now arrived in Louisville to visit our three stores there.
I cannot remember if I expected for him to be pleased by my initiative, but I have never forgotten his terse statement in an agitated voice. “You called a store while I was there this morning, and now you’re calling this store while I’m here. Stop calling so many stores! They have the shoe and it will be shipped to your store.” He then hung up.
Needless to say, this episode was in the back of my mind whenever I thought about the policy on checking with other stores. I think with today’s higher degree of connected operations a retailer likely has an easier way to obtain a shoe for a customer, but it wouldn’t happen at the store where I worked—the entire chain went out of business. I didn’t find out if there were many other managers with the mindset of that regional manager, but I decided to leave the company and pursue an MBA. (Ironically, a different regional manager called me after I had resigned to tell me that he had wanted to offer me my own store to manage. I guess he hadn’t heard about all my phone calls that first year!)
Having a policy that most people in your organization know about but that is not encouraged to be used sends mixed signals (at the least). Do you have such built-in disincentives in your organization? If you aren’t sure, talking with employees and customers regularly can help you discover them and take action. Remove them, and look for ways to replace them with incentives instead.
Whenever disincentives are reduced and the right incentives are in place, the current employment issue will be resolved. You may still have to wait for a table at a popular restaurant, but at least your wait will be less likely to come with a side of “understaffed.”
-Terry