Viewpoint: Reward and recognise for profit, not loss

It's important to support staff with fair wages and a pioneering approach that puts them in the driving seat of their own success, says Nick Appell

What's the benefit of handsomely rewarding and recognising your staff and how do you measure the impact it has on your business?

This has been a key focus at Casna for the past 30 years and it's why we have one of the highest levels of staff retention in the hospitality cleaning industry. I wanted to share what we've learned along the way.

We know that it's important to pay the very best wages possible to our staff, to nurture them to be the best they can be, to treat them with the greatest of respect and to recognise that they are the most important ingredient to our business. This results in staff working with pride, enjoying their jobs and staying with the company as it grows.

Get this right and it enables you to drive your brand and service to ever-higher levels of excellence, without having to constantly focus on recruitment.

Over the course of 30 years, we have fine-tuned the balance between labour costs and productivity. Paying minimum wage is a false economy because savings made by lower headline rates are negated by a significant loss of productivity due to high staff turnover.

We recently commissioned a project team to apply rigorous analysis to staff turnover, training costs, time required to get team members up to speed and resulting productivity levels. As part of the project, the team gathered this information from across several hospitality sectors.

The results showed that in many cases your workforce could be working for prolonged periods of time at 50% productivity. When applying proper maths, rather than just guesswork, facts are often revealed that you may not want to see.

Don't be afraid to pay people above what you consider is their market rate based on their experience. We have proven time and time again that if you exceed someone's expectations in their salary level, and then give them the skills to succeed in their role, they will give you back your investment many times over, year after year.

It's important to support staff, not just with good wages, but with a pioneering approach that puts them in the driving seat of their own success. That approach to autonomy sets us apart from our competitors, which is why we work in some of the most prestigious buildings and businesses in the UK.

We trust our staff and they trust us, so we work well together for the long haul.

As a cleaning company we strive to redefine the gold standards in cleaning, and by loving and rewarding our team members, we continue to make perfection our business.

Nick Appell is chief executive of Casna Group