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are still really important and you can still take away a lot from working with us.” While not everyone might want to be a manager, others end up in those positions by default. Ensuring the right people are in the right roles is crucial. “Accidental managers is something I’m starting to see more of,” says the Urban Leisure Group’s Stamp. She cites a recent Chartered Management Institute survey that found 82% of people who currently hold a management role have had no formal leadership or management training. It also found just 25% of respondents rated their manager as highly effective. Those who didn’t rate their manager as highly effective were twice as likely to leave in the next 12 months. “You can draw a straight line between these
under-qualified, over-promoted managers and people leaving.” She adds: “But it is important to note it’s not their fault – they’re not being equipped with the tools they need to do the job.” Vale recognises this scenario. “We ended up
with a lot of unplanned managers and we’ve tried to combat that in the past few years with a very clear pathway of training,” he says. This involves a mixture of online courses
and in-person training and coaching, which is a requirement to move up. “People work for people and if they have an unskilled, untrained manager above them, quite often they leave.”
26 | The Caterer | 24 November 2023
“It’s about how you can empower [staff] and take away some
of those pain points” Dan Maimone
Automating intelligently Undoubtedly, there is an administrative bur- den associated with management roles, which is where technology can often step in. “For accidental managers, [there are] tools
you can give them to take some of those cru- cial operational things away,” says Maimone. “At Harri, for example, we see more people adopting our scheduling tools, so employees can enter their availability and when they’re off – it can auto-schedule employees based on their [skillset] as well.” There are also features that can aid junior managers with staff forecasting. “That has a det- rimental impact on the business. If you under- forecast on a Saturday, staff are under pressure and then, all of a sudden, people start leaving,” he says. “It’s about how you can empower [staff] and take away some of those pain points.” Stamp has found these tools can help
remove the ad hoc nature of scheduling: “Something we’ve been able to harness through Harri is unavailability or holiday sub- mission. It really does annoy people as well, when a manager forgets that I’ve submitted unavailability or denies this time off for a gig because they haven’t been organised.” Cubitt House’s Flynn agrees that these processes should be automated where pos- sible, but says the purpose should be to give managers more time to interact with staff on a personal level. That approach can sometimes lead to unintended business benefits, which Flynn discovered after a serendipitous conver- sation with a member of staff. “We had a lovely lady we took on as a host-
ess in one of our sites. One of the things that helped with recruiting her was we changed our stance on flexibility, because she is in her late sixties and semi-retired,” she says. “And it just so happened that she was an English teacher in her previous career.” As the group has a percentage of people who
don’t speak English confidently, that led to the idea of asking her to provide lessons. “She coaches them and we’re really beginning to see a difference in that population of people.” For Flynn the lesson is clear. “Let the sys-
tems do what they are better at – doing payroll, compiling stats, making us more effective at doing the rosters – but that should be to enable us to have that human touch.”
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