Airport Experience® News - Post-Conference Issue 2023

Right: An ongoing focus on DE&I initiatives and policies is crucial in retaining strong talent, says Gregg Paradies of Paradies Lagardère.

up. We’re having to do bonuses just to [get our team members to] show up on a weekend, even though they’re now making $25 an hour. MCOWAN: The company culture is really important. Think about how many people were furloughed, and then how slowly people came back. As a tranche of new people [are hired], we have no history with them with our culture. How do you create the culture when half of your team is on Teams? There’s no personal touch going on at the unit level. It is harder to deliver what that culture is because culture changes whether people leave or join an organization. SVAGDIS: To piggyback on what Gregg said, the Super Bowl was just in Phoenix. Call outs on weekends are really bad now and we tolerate those call outs more now too. We incentivized employees with $1,000 each day on top of their regular pay to [work their shifts]. And people still called out sick. JOHNSON: In 2022 our mantra internally was hire, train and retain, and we hired about 24,000 associates in the year of 2022 alone.

I think there’s some shift in MAG, where new stores maybe just don’t have a MAG for the first year…. There will still be a MAG, but at least that gives us a little bit more freedom. I think the education piece is still largely missing. I think industry consultants have a role to play in that. I think we have a role to play in that. I think ARRA (Airport Restaurant & Retail Association) has a role to play in that. I thinkACI (Airports Council International-North America) has a role to play in that to make people understand what the business model looks like. PARADIES: I would agree with Roddy on a couple of points there. As far as evolution of RFPs, there’s been some movement. Has it been material? I can’t say material in all cases, but [airports are] listening, they’re understanding that especially retail is not what it used to be and it’s evolving. JOHNSON: I think there’s been a general curiosity about our business and about really the whole ecosystem through COVID. I think that our airport partners have gotten smarter, more educated…. We all got smarter about our businesses because when you strip it down to nothing and have to build it back, you know everything that goes into building it back. And I think that the airports were all along that ride with us. MONTES: Moving to a key challenge you all have faced for the past few years, which is labor: Are your restaurants and stores fully staffed and how are you addressing any shortfalls? WILSON: Labor is still an issue. There’s no question about it. And it’s not just in our business. It’s all across the country. And I submit to you that this is probably a bigger issue than many people think. Part of this is an immigration issue. We closed our borders for five years - not totally closed, but we closed out that lower rung of people that would come to theis country and work their way up. Until we build that back properly, we’re going to have these shortages. Everybody is looking at how to use technology to help address it. But the passenger ordering his coffee wants to talk to his barista…. They don’t want just a machine. In retail, sometimes it’s easier to grab what you want off the shelf and

walk out the door. But in the food and beverage side of the world, I think we still need people. SVAGDIS: Immigration’s a good one, but the other one is the number of females in the workforce has changed dramatically. Every year we do an engagement survey…. It’s great to see the different needs of each employee based on generation. Our workforce actually got older after COVID. I’m convinced that the younger generation [realized] this is a hard industry to work in and saw an opportunity…, and they retooled themselves and got into different industries. Another thing, when we talked to a lot of our female employees, [the reason they didn’t come back] was the cost of childcare. How do you retool? We got smarter on how we can use fewer people in the back of the kitchen. A lot of it is driven by our menus. You can’t have 50 items on a menu anymore because you just don’t have cooks. It’s the number one position we have a shortage in. MCOWAN: I want to take it just a slightly different angle. We work in a fantastic industry, right? You could almost have any career in aviation. We don’t do enough as an airport and as an individual city to actually market the airport as an opportunity. Nobody actually thinks about going to work in an airport and it being a potential career. PARADIES: Canadian airports do a better job of building communities where people are proud to work in the airport. That’s an opportunity that these major airports have. Atlanta with 50,000 employees - they have the scale to do something really special and invest in a big way, so we’re not all individually doing our own thing. The other big challenge, of course, is that recruiting is one thing but we all know retention is harder than ever. Fortunately, I think our culture has helped us bring back people and keep people. But [weekends are challenging with people] just not showing

Above: Michael Svagdis of SSP America says labor remains a key challenge for concessionaires, with young people turning to other employment options and women, in particular, opting to find alternatives or simply exit the workforce to focus on family.

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