Boost your business! Boost your talent pool! Boost Hospitality!
After months of inactivity hospitality industry has opened its doors fully and we at Umbrella Training want to inject as much of positivity into your organisational recovery, development, and your people.
We have several amazing projects that are aimed to support hospitality. In this blog we will be introducing Boost Hospitality (available in Greater London) and other grants and initiatives we have available in the rest of the country.
The initiatives that we are focusing on will show you the art of subsidising your L&D and recruitment budgets with government funding. We will discuss how to maximise the funding available and get a good ROI from initiatives around recruitment, training and retraining of your staff.
Boost Hospitality is a new Umbrella Training initiative fully funded by European Social Fund and delivered in partnership with Rinova Ltd.
Boost Hospitality allows us to support the hospitality industry in London by working with individual SMEs on analysing and addressing their immediate organisational needs.
Our consultants will work with your business to analyse the organisational, departmental and individual training needs and design FREE bespoke development sessions and programmes to support your talent.
Bigger Picture – Hospitality in Numbers
Boost Hospitality is aimed at SMEs in the Greater London area. SMEs are a key part of the hospitality economic ecosystem of the UK.
Most hospitality businesses are small or medium enterprises (SMEs).
97% of hospitality employers (133,315) businesses were micro or small businesses (1–49 employees).
There were 3,235 medium-sized businesses (50–249 employees) and 675 large businesses (250+ employees).
A Government briefing paper “Hospitality industry and Covid-19” published on 23rd March 2021 stated that during mid-February (8-21 February), 45% of hospitality businesses said that their profits were over 50% lower than normally expected at this time of year, compared to 13% of businesses across all sectors.
Between 22 February and 7 March 2021, 9% of hospitality businesses reported no cash reserves, compared to 4% across all industries.
Almost 1 in 5 hospitality businesses (19%) had “low confidence” that their business would survive the next 3 months.
What is ESF?
Boost Hospitality and other subsidies available can make a difference in the recovery process.
Boost Hospitality is part of a European Social Fund (ESF) project. It is Europe’s main instrument for supporting jobs, helping people get better jobs and ensuring fairer job opportunities for all EU citizens.
It works by investing in Europe’s human capital – its workers, its young people and all those seeking a job.
ESF financing of 10bn euros a year is improving job prospects for millions of Europeans, in particular those who find it difficult to get work. The ESF projects aim to build adaptability of workers with new skills, improved access to employment, support for disadvantaged groups to get jobs.
Who is eligible for Boost Hospitality?
The organisations who are eligible for this funding are micro, small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) which employ fewer than 250 persons and which have an annual turnover not exceeding 50m euros, and/or an annual balance sheet total not exceeding 43m euros.
Also, the eligibility is connected to where the head office of the business is.
The programme is delivered PAN-London, with a strong focus on the London Central region.
How does Boost Hospitality work?
Once you have engaged with us on this project our consultants will conduct an Organisational Needs Analysis. This will allow you to identify existing skills gaps and future skills needs over a short and medium time frame.
Our consultants will develop a bespoke package of support and suggest the best methods of enabling your employees to achieve progression.
The organisational needs analysis consists of a desktop review of the policies, procedures, business plan and change initiatives.
It will also aim to interview the key decision makers to understand what is needed to move forward. The questions in the ONA interviews will focus on exploring the vision of the business, the key challenges in short term, long term process changes planned, recruitment challenges as well as any new initiatives that the business needs support to implement.
We recommend to all businesses joining the project to take time to go through the process with their team and use it as an opportunity to reflect and build plans for the future with support of the organisational development professionals.
How much paperwork is involved?
The start of the process asks the organisation to go through the Organisational Needs Analysis and this is recorded as a plan for the project.
Other forms include the declaration of the eligibility that confirms the status of the organisation. The individuals engaged in the programme will then proceed to work with consultant on building their own Individual Learning Plans and will be supported through reviews on a monthly basis.
The interventions offered can focus on basic skills training, transferable skills (communications, team working, resilience, time management, accredited training courses, specialist hospitality courses etc.
What is the impact that we have recorded?
The businesses we have engaged with have said that the time to reflect and discuss their business strategically and with an organisational development specialist made an immediate difference to their strategic focus.
Once the initiatives were put in place, delegates attending the workshops reported that they were more motivated, more focused, and developed basic skills needed to get back into work and perform at pre pandemic levels.
Ellie Steele, one of the delegates of Boost Hospitality from Georgian House Hotel said:
“The largest benefit is providing me with the ability to have time for self-reflection aside from my everyday role at Georgian House. This in turn has enabled more critical thinking, reflection on problem solving and adopting more creativity when tackling change or challenge. This experience has been particularly helpful at a time where the industry has recently undergone such immense changes due to Brexit and the impact of Covid-19 and I have found the training to be a great team experience.”
Not London based? We can still help!
If you are not London based, there are other opportunities you could be utilising.
We will be using the same process of organisational analysis that is used in Boost Hospitality to find out what your needs are, but the interventions will centre around apprenticeships, kickstart and utilising the grants available.
We also work on facilitating levy gifting for those organisations who do not have levy funds to spend.
By mixing the available support opportunities like kickstart and apprenticeships grants you could be attracting as much as £4,500 in grants and between £2,730 to £4,920 in wages.
These opportunities are available until 30th September 2021 (apprenticeship grants) and 31st December 2021 (kickstart).
We need to be using every avenue available to us to support the recovery of hospitality.
To find out if you’re eligible for our BOOST initiative or if you have any questions, please contact us today
