New Employee Arrangement in Hotels and Restaurants: Is Salary Enough?

The human resource problem in hotels and restaurants can no longer be simply explained by the phrase "we can't find employees." While the sector is searching for new personnel, it must also rethink why existing employees are leaving, which skills are gaining value, and how technology is changing job descriptions.

In an opinion piece published on Hospitality Net on August 14, 2026, Prof. Robert O’Halloran, Director of the East Carolina University School of Hospitality Leadership, discusses the future workforce model of the sector through skill-based work, competitive pay, career development, and human-technology collaboration. O’Halloran's fundamental approach is to evaluate employees not merely as individuals performing tasks tied to specific job titles, but based on the skills they possess and can develop.

This perspective alone is not sufficient to define the future of the sector. However, when evaluated alongside current workforce research, it indicates a significant shift in the human resource policies of hotel and restaurant businesses: employee experience, development, and retention are becoming operational issues as important as recruitment.

Staff Shortage: A Bigger Problem than Employee Count

Data from the U.S. hotel industry illustrates the scale of the problem. In a survey conducted by the American Hotel & Lodging Association with 282 hoteliers at the beginning of 2025, 65% of participants reported experiencing staff shortages. Additionally, 71% of hotels stated they had open positions that they could not fill despite actively searching.

The most significant shortages were seen in the housekeeping department, followed by front office, kitchen, and maintenance positions. The most common method businesses used to attract and retain employees was offering higher wages. Flexible working hours and hotel discounts for employees were also among the tools used.

However, salary alone does not explain employee engagement.

Deloitte's assessment of frontline personnel in the hospitality, restaurant, and other service sectors considers changing employee expectations, technology, experience gaps, and the need for stability as parts of the same human resources problem. In the research, 75% of employees indicated they wanted more stability in their future work lives, while 82% stated that feeling happy and engaged at work is a key determinant of productivity. (Deloitte – Frontline Human Capital Trends)

This scenario creates a significant distinction for businesses. While salary may attract an employee to the business, whether they stay depends on a broader experience that includes their relationship with their manager, shift arrangements, learning opportunities, and the visibility of their career path.

Employment is Growing in Turkey; Human Resource Issues Persist

Data from Turkey also shows that the number of employees in accommodation and food service activities is not decreasing.

According to the Turkish Statistical Institute's (TÜİK) statistics on paid employees, the number of paid employees in accommodation and food service activities reached approximately 1 million 465 thousand in July 2025. This figure represented a 4.7% increase compared to the same month the previous year. In December 2025, there were approximately 1 million 243 thousand paid employees in the sector, with an annual increase of 5.4 recorded. Seasonal fluctuations in tourism and food service should also be considered when evaluating monthly differences. (TÜİK – Paid Employee Statistics, July 2025) (TÜİK – Paid Employee Statistics, December 2025)

The 2024 Labor Market Research by İŞKUR identified approximately 1.14 million employees in over 126 thousand workplaces in accommodation and food service activities. The research reported over 57 thousand open jobs in the sector. 20.9% of workplaces had shift work, while 18.5% had part-time work. (İŞKUR – Accommodation and Food Service Activities Sector Results)

Therefore, the simultaneous increase in employee numbers and the problem of finding personnel is not contradictory. The need for recruitment may continue in a growing sector or one with high employee turnover. The real question is how long the business can retain the employees it hires and the operational knowledge it loses when employees leave.

Transition from Job Descriptions to Skill Mapping

One of the striking discussions in the article on Hospitality Net is the evaluation of employees based on their skills rather than fixed titles.

The value of a restaurant employee cannot be measured solely by the titles "waiter," "barista," or "shift supervisor." Competencies such as product knowledge, sales skills, foreign language proficiency, complaint management, POS usage, inventory knowledge, team coordination, or training new employees can enable the same person to take on different roles within operations.

The same applies to hotels. A front office employee's foreign language and guest relations skills can be utilized in other departments; a kitchen employee's production knowledge can create development opportunities in purchasing or cost control.

The advantage of a skill-based approach for the business is that it makes the capacity of the existing workforce more visible. For employees, the advantage is that career development is not defined solely through "becoming a manager."

However, for this to happen, the business must genuinely know which skills its employees possess.

If the Career Path is Not Visible, Training May Lose Its Meaning

Training in hotels and restaurants is often limited to orientation or mandatory operational training. However, a more fundamental question for employees is: "What will change for me when I learn this?"

If a new skill has no connection to increased responsibility, a different position, a pay raise, or career opportunities, it may be challenging for the training program to create employee engagement.

Therefore, businesses should not conduct training plans and career plans independently.

For example, it can be explained which positions a service employee can transition to with skills in product knowledge, wine knowledge, sales, foreign language, and team leadership. Station competencies in the kitchen can be documented. Cross-training between departments in hotels can allow employees to experience different career paths.

This way, "promotion" is no longer a narrow path consisting solely of managerial steps.

Is Artificial Intelligence Coming to Replace or Assist Employees?

On the other side of the transformation in human resources is technology.

Deloitte emphasizes that employee experience is critical in the adoption of new technologies in the hospitality sector. Especially for frontline employees who constantly interact with guests, finding time and space to learn new systems is not easy. The adoption of technological changes that do not create clear benefits for employees can also be challenging.

Therefore, investments in artificial intelligence in hotels or restaurants should not be evaluated solely with the question, "How many jobs can we automate?"

Automation can be used in shift planning, forecasting, routine reporting, reservation management, employee communication, or repetitive administrative processes. However, if the time gained from technology is not genuinely transferred to guest relations, training, or operational quality, the productivity gains may remain limited in their impact on employee and customer experience.

Additionally, new systems create new training needs. Purchasing software and ensuring the team can use that software efficiently are not the same thing.

For Managers, the Issue is Making Culture Measurable

When "good workplace culture" is left as an abstract human resources discourse, it does not provide much guidance to the business.

Hotel and restaurant managers can monitor culture through more concrete indicators: employee turnover in the first 90 days, turnover rates by department, time to fill open positions, training hours per employee, internal promotion rates, absenteeism, overtime, and shift change requests are some of these.

Exit interviews should not be conducted merely as a procedure. If employees leave due to salary, managerial behavior, shifts, workload, career expectations, or team relationships, and this is regularly classified, the human resources problem can turn into measurable operational data.

The goal here is not to keep every employee in the business at all costs. It is to identify the reasons for unnecessary personnel loss in critical positions and reduce the operational costs of a continuous recruitment cycle.

Stafflink's Perspective

Reducing the discussion of employee engagement in HORECA businesses to broad generalizations like "the new generation does not want to work" can make the problems the business can solve invisible.

Salary is important, and it cannot be expected that a non-competitive salary policy will be compensated by cultural discourse. However, merely increasing salaries cannot eliminate poor shift planning, weak management, unclear task distribution, or invisible career paths.

In our view, a stronger model for businesses would be to manage human resources under four interconnected headings: fair pay, predictable work schedules, visible development paths, and technology that facilitates work.

Especially in an environment where employment in the sector continues to grow in Turkey, competition will not only be for winning customers. Businesses that can attract, develop, and retain experienced employees will also gain an advantage in operational quality.

Therefore, the fundamental question of the new employee arrangement may not be "How do we keep people working longer?" but rather, "What makes it valuable for people to continue working here?"