Lifestyle Report: The Staff

Legislation can make employing staff a headache, but it is a necessary one.

A very special skill which licensees must cultivate is the ability to recruit, train and manage staff. Although licensees are happy about their relationships with individual staff members, employment is covered by vast swathes of legislation that can add up to a very painful headache.

The smoking issue, the minimum wage, the Working Time Directive, discrimination laws and a raft of other social and legislative concerns are among many that can add to the pain.

Perhaps this is why around one in seven publicans who responded to the Coors-backed survey choose not to employ full-timers. The figure rises to 17 per cent among tenants and lessees who presumably opt to do more of the work themselves or place greater reliance on part-timers.

Lessees are more likely to employ full-timers. Only 10 per cent choose not to do so, and the majority (52 per cent) have between one and five full-timers. The proportion of freetraders and tenants employing between one and five full-time staff is significantly lower - 41 per cent in both cases.

The figures are mirrored in the overall picture for part-time staff. While 51 per cent of tenants take on between one and five part-timers, the figures for freetraders and lessees are 42 and 37 per cent respectively.

This may have much to do with the fact that lessees are more strongly represented in the urbanised South East. Their freetrade or tenanted colleagues, being more rural, are more likely to either close in the afternoon or experience greater seasonal trade fluctuations.

Further evidence for this lies in the fact that 42 per cent of freetraders in our sample are based in rural areas.

You're more likely to find at least one full-timer in a community pub - only 14 per cent have none - than in a rural pub (18 per cent). Again, this helps to explain why freetraders are less likely to employ full-time staff. Nine per cent of rural pubs don't even employ part-time staff, perhaps because levels of trade don't justify it.

Managed pubs, with more head office support, seem more willing to employ full-time staff. They also tend to be bigger pubs which would be harder to run with only part-time staff, especially as the managers themselves would be subject to the 48-hour week rule.

The average licensee has four staff. Very few pubs - less than six per cent of the sample - have no staff at all.

High staff turnover is another pressure on licensees. The longer people stay, the less time they need to spend on recruitment.

The great majority of licensees (68 per cent) say staff stick it out for at least a year, with 18 per cent staying for at least six months. Only seven per cent quit before that time and only a tiny fraction quit in their first month.

If staff are happier anywhere, it is with a freetrader, 72 per cent of whom report that staff stay for longer than a year, compared with percentages in the mid-60s for lessees and tenants.

Licensees in London report that one in 10 staff leave within six months, partly because of the more transient nature of staff in the capital's leisure industry. In Scotland, Wales and the West Midlands, the figure is one in 20 or better. In Wales, 75 per cent of staff stay longer than a year. The figure is almost matched in the South West.

Turnover rates were a little higher in food-led pubs, where one in 10 staff left before six months. Rates are lower in the high street, and slightly lower in rural pubs than in community outlets.