Aspen confab probes guest demands, service woes

Nation's Restaurant News, July 10, 1995 by Richard Martin

Favoritism as a means of boosting worker morale was both touted and attacked by the conferees. On one hand, "taking care of" good employees by assigning them lucrative service stations remains a valid tack, some contended. But "pampering a good employee only demoralizes and demotivates the others," said Michelle Schall of the Hilton Hawaiian Village in Honolulu.

The restaurateurs were in general agreement on the value of sharing cost data, shrinkage figures and profit thresholds with employees in order to create a motivating sense of ownership -- a concept currently in vogue in the business world as "open-book" management. But loud expressions of amazement, bordering on derision, greeted some restaurateurs' explanations of actual profit-sharing incentives they provide for their workers.

Nonetheless, descriptions of tuition reimbursement programs and cash payout plans based on attainment of sales goals eventually eclipsed cliched suggestions that shows of "respect" are sufficient to earn employees' loyalties.

One such monetary program was described by Greg Taylor, proprietor of the Friends Lake Inn in Chester-town, N.Y. The inn lends tuition funds to workers enrolling in service-training courses and other continuing-education programs; then, if the employee has remained on the job after one year, the loan is forgiven, Taylor said.

Earlier, attendees heard consumer analyst Barbara Caplan predict that customers' "tempered optimism" about their futures and abiding sense of "leisure deprivation" will provide an impetus for the unstinting patronage of restaurants. But that double-edged trend can cut both ways for restaurateurs as employers, she warned, because a rising leisure ethic coincides with a declining work ethic.