FAB 2024
Retaining and developing employees
The key subject of people in the airport F&B industry closed the main plenary conference sessions, with excellent contributions from SSP America Vice President, People Sherree Coker and Avolta North America Chief People and Culture Officer Laura FitzRandolph.
In a wide-ranging discussion with Moodie Davitt Report Founder & Chairman Martin Moodie, the duo highlighted the high costs of shedding employees and shared their strategies to retain and develop staff.
They also underlined the key role played by leadership in staff development and the value of Gallup employee surveys deployed by both SSP and Avolta in their employee retention strategies.
Discussing the challenges of recruitment thrown up by the COVID-19 crisis, and how a career in airport concessions is promoted, FitzRandolph said: “It is really about building the perception that the airport environment provides attractive career opportunities and showing a clear path to personal growth.
Talking people: Avolta North America Chief People and Culture Officer Laura FitzRandolph (centre) and SSP America Vice President People Sherree Coker (left)
“When you look at working in an airport, usually you will be coming in to perform an hourly paid job. So the first thing that we need to do, and it is something that we invest in, is showing what that career ladder looks like, especially when we get people into orientation. We’ve spent a lot of time mapping that career growth.”
There are many examples in SSP of people who started as cashiers moving all the way up to senior management or Vice President levels, Coker noted. These success stories are highlighted to new starters both in ad campaigns for new jobs and on the SSP website.
She added: “There is a tremendous growth in the industry wage structure post-COVID; our average hourly wage rate went up +30% since 2021, so incomes are certainly getting better, there’s a lot of opportunity to grow, and with our multi-brand structure across retail and F&B, the diversity of roles within the company is there as well.”
Coker, herself a cashier when she began her SSP career, spoke about the challenges of delivering good training to employees in the space-constrained airport environment, and how artificial intelligence (AI) is contributing to making light of that.
Sherree Coker: Scaling training at a global organisation
She said: “Because we have very small spaces, our employees generally have to be trained in those very tight places; the reality is we don’t have much opportunity to take them off-site for training.
“Then there is the fact that SSP America has hundreds of brands, and each one is unique. So trying to figure out how we can scale certain skill sets across all those brands is a challenge, and AI is now really playing a big role in how we tackle that.
“AI helps to make training scalable; it can do things for us so quickly, it takes the speed of developing that journey and rolling out the training much faster. It also allows us to present training in very bite-sized, digestible modules on mobile devices, so employees are not having to sit down in front of the computer for hours.
“If you have a bartender who has been working for us for years, their training might be very different than someone who’s new to us in the store, so AI is really helping us to break that down. It’s transformative in the learning and development space.”
FAB eZine
August 2024
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