“Don’t Join A Catering Company!”
says the Aunt who doesn’t want you to succeed. Guess who’s challenging her!
When we first started, attracting good talents had been a big challenge at Alpha. Working in a catering company was seen as a degrading job for some reason. We would rarely get any good candidate willing to work for us. More often than not, we couldn’t afford those candidates because we were a cash-starved fledgling business. Today, we have graduates from some of the top-universities in the country working in our team. We get 1800+ applications for a job post that’s been posted 2 hours ago. Perceptions are changing but there’s so much more to be done!
Initially, our efforts were restricted in communicating our differentiating factors to our customers and potential employees only. We hired trained chefs and cooks, and not traditional baburchis. We had a well-defined corporate structure and a professional attitude. We ditched methods like antiquated paperwork used by our competitors and adopted cloud-based systems since the very beginning. We tried our best to tell a story of disruption: one that’s pushing the boundary of an industry that’s been stagnant for centuries. But we seemed to have missed a crucial audience: the parents of our potential hires! As it seems, the parents of some of our employees aren’t quite thrilled that their children are working at a catering company. But why? This got us thinking.
A company is nothing but a piece of paper sitting in a file in some obscure government building. In the end, it’s nothing but a group of people working towards a common goal. The people. They’re what makes you want to get up every morning and come to work. It took us a while to realize the importance of having a solid HR in our company. But better late than never.
This past year, I have spent a considerable amount of my time trying to improve the company’s culture and working conditions. And the results are showing. As more and more people get to know about the kind of work we do at Alpha, perceptions regarding the industry are slowly changing. Internally, we have a really vibrant culture so this year one of my core objectives is to project that liveliness outwards and work on employer branding. This write-up is also a part of it! 😉
Here are the changes we made in 2019:
1. Increase the average pay by 2x: In the beginning, we were told that people just didn’t want to work in a catering company so we settled for some really bad hires. It was such a bad decision. Had we just offered a more competitive pay, we would’ve attracted some good talents, even at the beginning. Talented people are more expensive for a reason. They add more value than they take. Let me tell you an example. Ever since our Executive Chef joined, our food cost has lowered by more than 10%! In absolute terms, it translates to a few lacs. He is essentially paying for his own salary. The math is simple when it comes to evaluating a quality workforce.
2. Reduce working days from 6 to 5 days a week and introducing remote working: Everyone hates commuting. Our team is no different. In our country, we have this culture of working 6 days a week in local companies but unless we’re talking about operations, this really doesn’t add much value. More days don’t really translate to more output. At Alpha, we have observed no significant drop in output after implementing a 5-day workweek at the beginning of this year. Rather I see my team coming in fresh every Sunday, ready to take on any challenge you throw at them. For some departments like sales, unfortunately 5-day workweek isn’t feasible for a young company like ours. There, we gave them the freedom to work remotely and do client servicing from the comfort of their homes.
3. Introduce flexible working hours: Employees can now clock-in at 8/9/10 AM and can even leave early as long as the work gets done. Many a time, employers tend to focus on secondary factors like the hours an employee puts in rather than his/her actual output. This is flawed reasoning. What an employee wears, when he/she comes to office is secondary if that employee is consistently generating high-quality output.
4. Improve working environment: When we had good talents joining the company, we decided to ditch the hand-me-down dining tables and finally get proper desks. After 2.5 years, we finally decided to get air conditioning. We never really felt the need to invest in these equipment because for us there were two questions that needed to be answered when making a purchase: (i) will it increase sales?; (ii) will it lower costs? Initially, it felt like installing an AC did neither. But when we saw how people enjoyed the new air-conditioned environment, we realized that even though the costs increased, it relaxed everyone which in turn improved productivity. Breakfast and lunch, which have been free for every employee since the beginning, were actively scrutinized and improved over time. We had closed down our pantry when we scaled down (that’s a whole different story), but we have since re-opened the pantry, a move which was highly appreciated by everyone.
6. Gamify good behaviors: It is tough to enforce basic behaviors like always wearing hairnets in the kitchen, attending meetings on time etc. when you have employees coming from all over the socio-economic spectrum. We started rewarding employees year-end cash bonuses to reinforce positive outcomes. But we wanted to do more. So we implemented a “fine” jar with a list of fines like BDT 20 if someone is caught not wearing hairnet inside the kitchen or BDT 0.5 for each minute of delay caused in a meeting. The money accumulated in the jar will be used for dining out someday. To my surprise, employees started to hold each other accountable. They started filming each other secretly whenever there was a violation. Suddenly, penalizing had become fun! So yes, it is possible to make negative reinforcement fun.
7. Relentless focus on improving culture: We did it all. We introduced employee of the month programs. We do monthly barbecues. We do special lunches every Tuesday. We do food tastings every now and then. The food is so good at Alpha that people tend to gain 7-8 kgs of weight in just 3 months (something that has prompted health concerns!).
8. Change is the only constant: I constantly tell my team that Alpha is not a family. We’re a sports team. Even the most valuable player in a team is benched then kicked out if he/she isn’t performing at the field. So we have ingrained this philosophy that change is the only constant. That if you’re not learning and growing, and you’re doing the same thing month after month, then you’ll survive today, maybe tomorrow, but when the day after tomorrow comes, you’ll probably be doing the same thing but in a different company. To facilitate that, we have created an online resource where 150 premium online courses are housed. We have a mini-library where anyone can read any book they want. Employees are regularly encouraged to attend training sessions where the company fully or partially bears the cost of the training. If someone wants to read a book, buy an online course or software suite, or simply attend a seminar, we jump at that opportunity. Recently, we have also started stared calling some of the country’s top CXOs to hold sessions in our office. Something totally unheard of in this industry. This philosophy can be best summarized by something I came across years ago:
For the year 2020, we have some big milestones to achieve. In the coming days we are taking the following measures:
1. Introduce health insurance for all permanent employees: Alpha bears all medical expenses for its employees. We actually spend a considerable amount of money on it already. Now the time has come to formalize it under a health insurance plan.
2. Improve gender diversity: The name Alpha is very masculine and the current gender ratio in the company doesn’t really help much to refute that statement. We plan on achieving a balance in gender diversity in the coming years.
3. Transition the brand identity from Alpha Catering to simply Alpha: As we transition from a catering company to a tech-enabled service company, we have decided to drop the word “catering” from our communications. In the coming months, a client will interact with multiple services under the umbrella brand “Alpha”.
And that’s it! The road ahead is long. But as we navigate through the tricky waters of the hospitality industry, one thing is for certain – change is here to stay.
Your feedback matters
It’s been a while since I wrote something. Please do let me know what you think about these initiatives and your two cents on how we can improve them further. I guess my next article will be on the HR learnings I have garnered over the last 3-4 years. Stay tuned!
