What are staff skill levels like?

Mark Patten: I think it’s a little bit more of a challenge these days. You have to look at the countries where the majority of the staff are being pulled from and what level of skill, and what the philosophy of the company has in hiring staff; whether it’s hiring for attitude and training for skill.

The growth spurt in the Middle East has led to a bit of a challenge in regards to ongoing training and development of staff because the key today is about staff retention, developing your team and building a strong team.
If you look at any successful team in the world, they weren’t built on a couple of years, they were built on many years.

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It’s the same people doing the same thing over and over, but then developing their creativity and that takes time, and you can only do that if you keep and retain the same people.

The challenge there is you have optimistic individuals that want to move quickly for the wrong reasons, you have that in many places, but here you find it because of the multiculturalism. You take single culture environments like India, Hong Kong and Barbados and they stick like glue — there’s a cultural aspect to it.

When you look at multicultural environments like Singapore, Dubai, Australia and many other countries, you will find the tendency that people move quite frequently and that’s where for us leading teams it becomes challenging.

You have to pull a different book off the shelf. There are two ways of managing — one where you are in a single culture and one in a multicultural environment, and if you are experienced enough to be both you understand what you need to do, but today in the UAE the biggest challenge is staff retention.

So what are these differences?

MP: It’s a different approach, you have to be culturally aware of where your team is from, you need to adapt the way you manage. I’m talking culture, but I’m also talking about age demographics, generation Y and X.

We are all baby boomers here, a bit older, but 65% of my team are all born after 1981 and they work on a completely different beat of the drum. You have to learn what motivates them, why do they want to put a uniform on and be creative and do the same thing day in and day out.

Steven Benson-Flower: But retention has got better. I arrived in 2007 and staff were flying out the door left right and centre and it took me a long time to stabilise and get it back up to where I wanted it. But once you have it maintained, boom another five have gone or 10 drop because another three hotels have opened up around you.

Let’s say you lose a couple of commis or demi chefs, first I look at stewarding, are there any stewards with catering diplomas that have just come in to get the foot in the door?

And that’s what I didn’t do when I first arrived because I was too busy looking for chefs and a lot of mistakes would be made where I would bring in a chef de partie, and you rely so much on the chef de partie, and the guy just wouldn’t be able to cope.
I found that looking at stewarding first and only bringing in from outside if nothing is there and building up the team like that is the right way to do it.
That helps retain staff because they see that I’m not bringing in senior chefs from outside unless I have to.

There are some chefs that just need a little more motivation and guidance and to be told they have potential. I can then leave a position vacant and say ‘if you do this, this and this in the next three six months, if you are strong enough we will slot you in there’.

JC: As Steven said, it’s all about loyalty and the culture you create in your establishment. And now as executive chefs we are far more than just creative, passionate people.

But the key is how you create a culture, a sense of loyalty where they want to work with the staff and the company, because, let’s be quite honest here, everyone’s here for the same reason, to make money to send home, we all have responsibilities elsewhere.

They say ‘they don’t leave the company, they leave who they are working for’. I think our roles are far more critical than in years gone by because of that responsibility we have to our people.

MP: Not only that, if you want to be good at anything you are going to have to build a team that is loyal and from that loyal team you are going to get results. But you have to practise a lot and get better at it every day.

But from a regional point of view I think that is something that has to be highlighted, sometimes it’s too easily accepted. You will have someone turn up say on Steven’s door ‘I work for chef Mark over in the Atlantis’.

We need to have an understanding amongst ourselves that we are not going to grab that guy because he is good, maybe pick up the phone and say ‘hey Steven this guy has turned up on my doorstep’, and once people realise we do that then the good guys will move for the right reasons.

SBF: On the loyalty side, very few chefs are doing two years in a position. From day one it was always a minimum of two years. When I see CVs sometimes I call them ‘you have a good CV, why do you have a year here and half a year there?’.

Just sit put and work a minimum of two years and if you go to three years that just really puts a tick, because it shows you have company loyalty, you are not ducking and diving and I think as executive chefs go, 100% every CV I get that’s a year or year and half I don’t touch it. It really frustrates me when they move on after a year — it shouldn’t be like that.

MP: That comes to the generation X and Y. When we were doing our training we would never think twice that we wouldn’t stick by what we said we would do.
It was a minimum of two years, maybe more, and that’s where we have to manage differently. The generation now is as fickle as a 15-year-old girl on her prom night, no disrespect, but they will move for a better looking uniform or AED 10 (US $2.7) more in their pay packet.

So to get them to show that loyalty you have to show them something more than getting them to work every day. It’s all relative, the only benefit you do have with multi-outlets is you have the opportunity to move people around so there should be less reason for someone to leave.

I promote on average 80 to 100 a year out of a team of 440 so that’s pretty good going and September will be our third year open. I have dropped my turnover by 50% from last year, that took a lot of work.