Want to Reduce Labour Costs?

Series: Part 1/3

This is the one cost variable that can be a challenge, and typically a good reason clients seek my help as an hospitality recruiter. The need to carefully monitor and reduce labour costs is especially important in the current economic situation, with increased energy costs, and for BC, we must consider the imminent increase in minimum wage.

This series' focus is youth incentive programs although not exclusively:

+ Youth Skills BC(YSBC) Hiring Incentives or the Skills Link Program

+ Targeted Wage Subsidies for Employers (Nationwide)

The YSBC is a pilot project offering BC employers a $2000 hiring incentive (up to 3 employees at $2000 each) to hire eligible youth between the ages of 15 and 29 and goes further to offer a training allowance of up to $1000 for this new employee.

Skills Link provides funding to hire youth between the ages of 15 and 30 inclusive who are not on Employment Insurance and experiencing barriers to employment; ie: single parents or living in rural locations.

The Targeted Wage Subsidy program provides employers with temporary financial assistance towards wages of eligible individuals whom they hire. The incentive is for employers to hire candidates they may not have hired otherwise without the subsidy.


Target Professionals Hospitality Recruiting sources management and executive level candidates within Western Canada. Visit us online or call at 604.552.2377 for service information.

More Pay = More Satisfaction?

We all want a job that pays well, right? How many of us think things like "if I could only make "X" amount more, I would be happy"? Tempting to think such things isn't it? These questions, of course, address the old debate of whether pay leads to satisfaction. We've all heard anecdotes about people who make lots of money and are miserable yet many of us can't help but think that more money would give us more job satisfactaion as well as improve our lives overall.

In the Journal of Vocational Behavior, Author T.A. Judge, et al, recently put this issue to the test to find out if employees find higher paying jobs more satisfying. While their results suggest that within organizations, higher pay is associated with higher job satisfaction, the relationship was not very strong. Not surprisingly, the results also suggest that pay level is more strongly related to employees' satisfaction with pay specifically than with the job overall. Moreover, the fairly weak relationships between pay level and satisfaction were consistent across several countries (U.S., Great Britain, India, Australia, Taiwan).

This study suggests that while increased pay is somewhat associated with increased satisfaction, it's not a strong enough correlation to say anything definitively. If employees truly want satisfying work, then searching for the best paying job is probably not the way to go.

The authors note that attractive characteristics of the leaders and the actual job are likely better predictors of job satisfaction than pay level. People tend to leave positions more because of issues with their direct boss rather than any other issue.

While these results also suggest that increasing pay alone is probably not the best way to improve employees' attitudes, they advise that pay does have motivational power. Being a pay leader in the industry is unlikely to boost organization-wide satisfaction, because employees tend to compare themselves to others, but it will attract highly qualified candidates who value their own skills and experience and look for a company that fairly compensates and values employees financially as well as otherwise.



Publication: Journal of Vocational Behavior (OCT 2010)

Article: The relationship between pay and job satisfaction: A meta-analysis of the literature

Authors: T.A. Judge, R.F. Piccolo, N.P. Podsakoff, J.C. Shaw, and B.L. Rich

Restaurant Waste Trends

If you've been in a restaurant kitchen, as many of you have considering this blog is all about hospitality, you've seen how much food, water and energy can be wasted there. Chef Arthur Potts-Dawson shares his very personal vision for drastically reducing restaurant, and supermarket, waste -- creating recycling, composting, sustainable engines for good (and good food). Here's a link to his talk, it's only 8minutes of your workday and very interesting.....

Arthur Potts Dawson: A vision for sustainable restaurants | Video on TED.com