Employee turnover refers to the rate that employees switch jobs and leave a company and are replaced by other people. Within the catering industry, modern competition focuses around people and communities. So the rise and fall of a restaurant depends largely on the quality of its employees, team consciousness and human resource management levels. These days, however, employee turnover in restaurants has become a serious problem, which is one of the aspects that bring negative effects to the stable development of restaurants.
Employee turnover is not only the issue related to individual’s thought, feeling and attitude towards their job, but also substantially associated with the level of human resource management (HRM) and team consciousness of employees. Boxall and Purcell (2003:1) use the term (HRM) to refer to all those activities associated with the management of employment relationship in the firm. Daniel Levi (2001:19-39) notes that, a team is a special type of group in which people work interdependently to accomplish a goal.The day-to-day operations of organisations can be shifted to teamwork.
Hence, a strong service team is obviously a key point in increasing organisational effectiveness, which often leads to improvements in job satisfaction and quality of work life. However, although these studies are useful in showing the importance of human resource management in restaurants’ operation, they do not specifically point out why turnover rate of restaurants’ employees is increasingly high. This project, therefore, aims to explore some possible reasons why employee turnover is common in restaurants.This investigation will be conducted via a questionnaire distributed to a sample of employees serving in restaurants at Newcastle upon Tyne. 39 subjects will be selected, in order to ascertain the main causes of this phenomenon. The investigation, analysis and the final results could be of great importance in terms of stable and efficient restaurant operation.
Methodology This study aimed to find out some possible causes of employee turnover in restaurants. In order to collect as much information as possible and shorten the time of investigation, a questionnaire was used, which consists of two sections.The first section is about demographic information of restaurant employees, which contains their age, gender, marital status and number of children. Section two focused on reasons of turnover, or the reverse, staff satisfaction with their job, including satisfaction with salary, management, cooperative style relationship, work-life balance, employee involvement, individual development and their attitude towards the nature of service. In order to make the investigation process more standard, permission of the head of human resource management department of each restaurant was asked before conducting the survey.With approval, questionnaires then were distributed to selected staff.
Employees were informed that the purpose of the investigation was to measure and evaluate their views and satisfaction level of their job, which was considered as strictly confidential and has been remained anonymous. Some obstacles were also encountered when sampling, one possible reason is that time is not enough for some restaurant staff to fill out the questionnaire during their working time. But efforts of avoiding their peak hours were made. Therefore, the response rate, on the whole, is essentially normal.
