Businesses talk strategy in dealing with summer worker shortage

It’s no secret that Whitefish businesses are always looking for workers in the summer.

Whether it’s cutting down dinner hours at restaurants or even closing on certain days due to a lack of staffing, many local businesses have struggled to keep up with rampant summer visitation while a shortage of employees exists.

This was the topic of a Summer Staffing Summit, hosted by the Whitefish Chamber last Tuesday at Grouse Mountain Lodge.

The summit featured a panel of local Flathead business leaders who shared their ideas and solutions to workforce challenges during the summer. Roughly two dozen local business owners and community members attended the talk.

Kristi Hanchett, Human Resources Director at Whitefish Mountain Resort, said the biggest barriers to full staffing for the resort, usually with college student employees, have been the start date of mid-June and the need to work around vacations or early starts to the fall semester. In the past she’s had 20 to 25 employees fully hired who decided to not work right before the summer season opened.

She said the keys for working past those barriers were to be more flexible with employees’ schedules and to start earlier. The resort for the past two years has kicked off its summer season early with a Memorial Day weekend opening.

She also said there’s been a push to improve the workplace culture at WMR, in the hopes of boosting morale and getting employees to return year-after-year.

“We decided to focus on culture, trying to make our work fun. So we talked about Whitefish Mountain Resort being a fun place for guests, but how can we make that fun for our employees? So we really focused on, ‘If we have them hired, how can we keep them here? How can we keep this a place where people are excited to come to work?’” she said.

Nick Berry, Human Resources for Pursuit at Grouse Mountain Lodge, added on to that, noting that even little things like taking staff out for Sweet Peaks after a long week can add a lot of value.

“What’s $50 of my bottom line when they’re excited to come back and clean a room the next day? Anything I can do to make that happen,” he said.

Berry said Pursuit hires roughly 700 to 800 employees in the area, including Glacier National Park, each summer.

One trend Berry says he’s noticed in his workforce is an interest in all the different aspects of the business, not just the individual’s job.

“Especially with younger people, they want to be able to do a lot of different things. They are interested in knowing the business and learning a lot of things, so our ability to show them that has definitely been a win for us,” he said.

As far as attracting more employees to local businesses, Corey Utterback, Senior Human Resources Director at Glacier Restaurant Group, spoke to his company’s decision last summer to increase wages to $15 an hour at local restaurants like the Craggy Range.

“We didn’t make the decision lightly, and it was something that was five years in the making. The reason we did it was because it was time,” he said, noting that a wage boost like that is only effective if it’s really communicating value. “You can pay somebody $15 an hour, and what most HR professionals will tell you is it only goes so far. You talk to employees who finally get that wage, salary, title they wanted, and if the employee doesn’t feel valued, it doesn’t matter.”

During a question period, Whitefish Lake Restaurant owner Doug Reed asked what about the effect of the wage change.

“It wasn’t long lasting,” Utterback said. “It created ripples in the community. Other business owners were frustrated, but many of them, whether they were frustrated or not, adjusted their wages.”

“By no means was it a magic bullet,” he added.

One of the topics that arose during the summit was housing. Each panelist had a variety of housing problems and solutions for their summer employees.

Berry said Grouse has about 30 beds for employees scattered in apartments around Whitefish, while Hanchett said she works with the Whitefish Motel and Studios to rent out a dozen units for her employees.

In the latter case, she says she appreciates Dave Gawe, owner of the Whitefish Motel, serving in a secondary role as a housing manager.

“The blessing for me is that he is on site. He has his office there, an apartment above his office, and he acts as my housing manager,” she said. “Because it’s his own personal building, he takes a lot of pride in it, checks in with the students and is very much their go-to there.”

As for problems, Utterback said one of the biggest things deterring workers from coming to Whitefish is a lack of affordable housing.

“You think with the locations we have in the Valley, you could look at somebody in north Kalispell who’s working on the line and say, ‘Hey, we’d like you to work in Whitefish for three months.’ The problem with that is they say, ‘Great, where am I going to live?’ And on top of that the commute becomes a problem,” he said.

On the employee side, Jesse Davis, Workforce Consultant at Job Service, gave a look at what kinds of people are in need of work in the Flathead Valley.

Davis’s most recent numbers showed 1,600 people in the Flathead in July seeking employment.

“What we’re working with a lot are a lot of people on the bottom who maybe need some help with soft skills, customer service skills, computer skills, things like that. People who are very employable but need some extra help and training to work their way up,” he said. “And a lot of people at the top who are coming out of very specialized fields, we’ve been seeing architects, people at high level IT jobs, that are coming from a place where maybe there’s three people in the Valley that do what they do.”