Central Planning as solution to labour market tightness

The Netherlands' first all-round outsourcing planning agency

More than three quarters of hospitality entrepreneurs say they are suffering from the current labour shortage and that this is negatively affecting their business. This labour shortage has increased work pressure, increased outflow and reduced loyalty.

Caterers, event venues and hotels, which regularly use staff suppliers and freelancers, have to work with multiple parties to complete the planning due to labour shortages. Besides the huge communication and administrative burden, this often does not improve the quality of work. It is sometimes forgotten that staff suppliers and clients have conflicting interests in the process. A hotel wants to offer the best quality hospitality experience at the lowest personnel costs, while a personnel supplier would prefer to be able to write as many hours as possible at the highest possible rate. In times of labour shortages, the quality of labour and the commitment of the individual employee then sometimes become less relevant.   

It is possible to get both internal and external employees more involved in the organisation by giving more attention to the individual employee through efficient workforce policies, deployment of the right tools and attention to personal workforce planning.  

Planning is a profession in its own right. Many organisations struggle with efficient staff planning and all the administrative work involved. Especially now that many industries are facing labour shortages, organisations are confronted daily with complex staff planning issues and other workforce challenges.  

For most hotels and other hospitality companies, planning, and especially the communication involved, is a time-consuming and necessary process on top of all other work. It distracts from core tasks and requires specific know-how. Often, insufficient attention is paid to things like knowledge transfer, on-boarding, training, change management, clear communication, engagement, pool management and legal regulations. However, these components are hugely important for successful operations. Sometimes workforce planning and time recording tools are used, but these are rarely used to their full potential due to lack of workforce knowledge and expertise. "In practice, organisations often only 15% of the capabilities of workforce planning software tools due to lack of workforce knowledge," says Ritsaert Krauss, CEO Central Planning.

Labour crunch - the challenges

In the first quarter of 2023, there were more than 35,000 vacancies within the hospitality industry. The UWV expects this number to rise to over 115,000 vacancies in 2023/2024. The hospitality industry in the Netherlands has traditionally faced high staff turnover, due to the high number of students and young people doing hospitality work as a side job. In addition, within hospitality, the outflow of staff to other industries is seen as a threat. Fortunately, the number of MBO graduates from hospitality courses has stabilised in 2022 after years of decline. Unfortunately, this will not eliminate the labour shortage in 2024. The main cause of outflow within hospitality is working conditions and higher hourly wages. Workload, flexibility and appreciation also play an important role. Some employees have started hiring themselves out as self-employed, which has further increased staff costs and workload and put further pressure on employee loyalty. 

Improving labour force participation 

To maintain a healthy employee pool, organisations will need to use various tools to properly recruit, plan, engage, bond, assess, on-board and further train people. This applies to both permanent and flexible employees, managers, temporary workers, staff suppliers and self-employed workers. However, the often missing expertise and software knowledge are essential in healthy personnel planning, workforce management and pool management. An independent outsourcing planning agency, such as Central Planning, can completely unburden operational departments and executives within hospitality in the field of workforce management and time management. Through this innovative collaboration, hospitality companies can save a lot of time and fully focus on their core business. This agency has the knowledge expertise and possesses an extensive palette of HR tools and apps, which they can deploy to their clients' staff in a targeted way.

To improve quality of work and labour participation, in an ideal world, all permanent and flexible employees of a client are trained and engaged equally with the organisation. This creates a better grip on labour and connection of all employees. As a result, the engagement, loyalty, quality of labour and hence productivity of the organisation can grow exponentially.