Finding a home with corporate giants
But it’s not just cooks that are in scant supply. Houston Independent School District in Texas is having a hard time finding warehouse drivers, which help supply food to the district’s 287 schools. Some of these licensed drivers are getting behind the wheel for behemoths like Amazon, Google and UPS instead of local schools, says Sheleah Reed, general manager for communications and strategic services for HISD. High-paying construction jobs and rebuilding jobs after Hurricane Harvey are another source of talent drain, Reed says. To boost outreach, the operation also upped the number of job fairs and spread them out across the city. At one of the fairs Reed attended, the line was wrapped around the building.
In an effort to retain the staff it does have, Houston Independent School District launched a six-week training program for 10 to 20 of its foodservice associates. The nominees get a crash course on topics ranging from communication to federal nutrition regulations to email etiquette. When a position opens up, alumni from the training program have first dibs. Nutrition leadership also visits the sites, asking staff what they want to learn and incorporating that into the training programs. The operation recently added conversational Spanish and English classes to the syllabus after one foodservice employee asked for them. “That way when the rodeo rolls in or there’s a new opportunity for 25 cents more, she won’t jump at it, because she thinks about what this means,” she says. (By the way, the rodeo bit isn’t a figure of speech for Reed; the operation really does face staffing issues when team members go to work for the rodeo.)
Whatever the reason staff are out of reach, struggling operators are beginning to dig for a deeper connection with staff. “Money is important, but we need to find a way to connect,” Reed says. “We’re actually in a budget shortfall, but you can still make people feel connected.”