Tag Archives: Employee Management

How to Get Your Message Across to Restaurant Managers

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By David Scott Peters

www.therestaurantexpert.com

In Last week’s post I covered the pitfalls of not communicating with your management team and offered up a solution to avoid a failure to communicate. The solution is to have weekly managers meetings.

To begin having effective managers meetings, follow this four-step process that prepares everyone for this new activity in the routine.

Step 1

Step one is the planning meeting. This is the step where you look at last week’s priorities and goals and audit where they are. Did they get accomplished, did you hit your goals or were there things that happened that delayed results? Take the time to really look at things with a detailed eye.

Next, create your list of goals for you and your team for the upcoming week. Be specific and clear in the list of what you want done, how you want it done, how well you want it done and more importantly by when. Without deadlines nothing would get done.

Step one applies to every restaurant owner whether you have a partner or not. The only difference is when you have a partner, this step becomes even more important.

Too often in independent restaurants, partners don’t communicate. As a result, they send mixed signals to their employees and managers because they ask them to do two completely opposite things or get the same thing done two completely different ways. Or worse, they do this directly in front the employee resulting in an argument/fight between the partners.

This is the quickest way to get your employees to tune you out and then do whatever they want. The employee knows that they can just point fingers to the other partner and there will be no recourse.

If you have a partner this is the most important step because it puts you both on the same page, allowing you to all communicate the same game plan from the same playbook.

Even if you don’t have a partner, you can create a similar challenge when you continue to change your mind on how you want something done, telling one manager and then getting mad at another because they aren’t doing it the new way, even though they never got the message.

Step 2

Meet with your general manager and communicate the goals for the next week. Gather your general manager’s priorities that need to be addressed and added to the list. This is your opportunity to make sure your general manager is on the same page as you. You are also setting the general manager up for success to conduct an effective and efficient managers meeting.

Step 3

Step three is the agenda. Now that your general manager has your list of goals for the week, he or she will create an agenda for the meeting. The agenda should include such things as a start time and a finish time and topics to be addressed.

Before the meeting, clearly communicate what ALL of the other managers will need to bring to the meeting. If any of the other managers have something they want to add to the agenda, they need to get it to the general manager at least two days before the managers meeting.

Please note that your manager meeting should not be scheduled for anything more than 90 minutes. Anything longer becomes counterproductive.

Step 4

Step four is conducting the actual meeting. One of the biggest questions I get all the time is, “I’m the owner, shouldn’t I conduct the meeting?” The short answer is NO, unless you fulfill the general manager role as well. Your general manager is supposed to execute the plan. He or she is going to be held accountable for these goals, so you need to put them in a leadership role and demonstrate that the general manager is the other managers’ direct supervisor.

When conducting the meeting, the general manager will do about 25 percent to no more than 50 percent of the talking. This is because your managers have come to the meetings knowing what they are responsible for. They will have brought the correct information from cost of goods sold and labor costs to employee issues to project updates. They will present to the group. You want every manager engaged and participating in the meeting.

Be sure to stick to this agenda. If and when a NEW topic comes up, make sure you determine if it should be tabled until the next meeting or if you need to set up a sidebar meeting after the manager meeting. Do not add it on the fly. When you don’t control the topics, start and stop time, managers meetings go forever. Anything longer than 90 minutes creates an environment where your mangers get frustrated because they feel you don’t value their time and quite frankly, they start tuning you out.

Timeline

What day you choose for your manager meeting is up to you. It can be determined based on the day all managers would be in the building anyway, or what day inconveniences the fewest managers.

An example might look like this:

Owners meet on Tuesday allowing the general manager to complete the budget variance reports for the past week so the owners have the numbers.

On Wednesday the owners and general manager meet to get on the same page and set the agenda.

On Thursday the general manager conducts the managers meeting.

Conclusion

If you’re tired of things not getting done, tired of not making the money your restaurant should be making and/or tired of being frustrated on a daily basis with everyone’s performance — owner or manager — then you’ll want to follow the four simple steps in this article. Just remember it’s not only about being organized, it’s also about being consistent. This comes from conducting the managers meeting weekly.

David Scott Peters TheRestaurantExpert (1)David Scott Peters is a restaurant expert, speaker, coach and trainer for independent restaurant owners. He is the developer of SMART Systems Pro, an online restaurant management software program helping the independent restaurant owner remain competitive and profitable in an industry boxed in by the big chain restaurants. He is best known as the SMART Systems guy who can walk into any restaurant and find $10,000 in undiscovered cash before he hits the back door… Guaranteed! Learn more at www.therestaurantexpert.com/rdspos.

 

Four Steps to Setting Standards in Your Restaurant

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By David Scott Peters

www.therestaurantexpert.com

You play a very important role in your restaurant, a role no one else can play. That’s the role of owner. And as an owner, right or wrong, your management team and line employees MUST follow your standards and you have to follow up to make sure they are being followed.

How do you set the standards and make sure they are being met? How do you ensure the process is working? How do you do all that without running shifts and micromanaging your management team?

Easy! With systems, follow up and a willingness to hold your management team accountable.

Follow these steps:
1) Document your standards
2) Implement and train systems
3) Follow up
4) Hold management accountable

1) Document your standards. Whether it is plate presentation, cleanliness, customer service or anything else that goes on in your restaurant, YOU MUST document your standards. You have to clearly communicate what those standards are. You can’t expect your management team to read your mind. That won’t work. So walk your restaurant and write down everything that drives you nuts when it’s not done to your standards. You can even go so far as to use photos to clearly communicate your expectation, such as with plate presentation or table setting. Work all of your standards into every checklist in your building, from management checklists, front-of-house and back-of-house checklists and all position training materials.

2) Implement and train systems. Print off the “Four Phase Plan to Greater Restaurant Profits” from members.TheRestaurantExpert.com. Start going through and identifying those systems you have in place and those you want to put into place. Put together a training program and/or system for you to remember to follow up and check that your standards are being trained and executed.

3) Follow up. This and the next step are the two most important steps. Even if you document. Even if you train. Even if you are there every day. If you don’t follow up to see that everyone is doing the job to your standards, you’ve gained nothing but a lot of worthless paperwork. Checking to see that your management team and line employees are doing things the way you want them done for every aspect of the business is critical to your restaurant’s success.

4) Hold management accountable. For some strange reason, restaurant owners can easily hold a line employee accountable. If a line employee screws up, they, for the most part, find it easy to write them up and possibly fire them because they are not performing to the owner’s expectations and standards. But when a manager screws up, they are given chance after chance after chance and often nothing more than a heart to heart conversation ever takes place.

NO! This is not right. They should be written up just like anyone else in your organization. In fact, I might say even more so than line employees.

Your management team is supposed to run the operation the same way you would when you are not there. They are the leaders and if they set bad examples, your line employees will lower their performance standards to meet what you allow from management.

Instead, if a manager does not meet expectations and needs to be written up, do so. You will find out very quickly if that manager wants their job or not. If they do, they will probably never be written up ever again. If they don’t, they will either quit quickly or get written up again soon thereafter hoping you will fire them. Either way, you will know pretty quickly and will have set the tone that you are serious about your standards being met.

These are the four steps you need to follow to set the standards – and make sure they’re being met – in your restaurant.

Contact us today to learn how to bring these steps to life in your restaurant. We have coaches and tools that will make it work for you.

David Scott Peters TheRestaurantExpert (1)David Scott Peters is a restaurant expert, speaker, coach and trainer for independent restaurant owners. He is the developer of SMART Systems Pro, an online restaurant management software program helping the independent restaurant owner remain competitive and profitable in an industry boxed in by the big chain restaurants. He is best known as the SMART Systems guy who can walk into any restaurant and find $10,000 in undiscovered cash before he hits the back door… Guaranteed! Learn more at www.therestaurantexpert.com/rdspos.

 

9 Things to Offer to Attract Good Restaurant Employees

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By David Scott Peters

www.therestaurantexpert.com

One of the key lessons I’ve learned over my years in the restaurant business is that not everyone works for you just for money. Money is a factor, but people are looking for much more.

So how do you provide the “much more?”

Many years ago now, restaurant coach Fred Langley best articulated what you have to strive for if you want to attract and keep the very best people on your team. He said you have to become the “Employer of Choice.” So what does that mean?

Without going into the whole explanation behind clinical psychologist Frederick Herzberg’s, “Herzberg’s Motivation-Hygiene Theory,” let’s cover the key factors beyond money that he says motivate people to work and work hard:

  1. Supervision – Make sure you have a management team that coaches employees to success, understands what makes each employee unique and is able to push their buttons to get the best of your people.
  2. Fair compensation – While you don’t have to be at the top of your market’s pay scale, you certainly cannot be at the bottom.
  3. Good working conditions – Make sure you have a clean restaurant, that you have all the right equipment and tools for your employees to do their jobs, and make safety a priority.
  4. Interpersonal relationships – Avoid at all costs having a management team that thinks all of their people are stupid and treats them like crap. Remember, this is a people business and it all starts with your internal customers.
  5. Recognition – Look for people doing things right in your restaurant and give them kudos when you see it. It’s easy to find people doing something wrong. When you focus on the good things, you create a positive work environment where people want to continue to please you vs. just waiting for the scolding.
  6. Responsibility – Sometimes you have great employees who have been with you for many years who NEVER want to be a part of the management team. Yet, they are willing to do more. Look to teach and assign them tasks that make the company better and get more done. Allow them to be a more valued asset on the team and they will be motivated to do more.
  7. Achievement – With responsibility there are often measurable results. When your team sees how what they do has a direct positive impact on the business, they get a real sense of achievement, which makes them want more.
  8. Advancement – Remember money is not the only thing people are looking for when they join your management team. Many want to know that there is a clear path to promotion and advancement in your company. Whether it’s moving up the management ladder, moving into the next better paying line position or gaining the skills that make them more valuable in their career, there needs to be a clear path to advancement that’s based on doing a good job, not who you are sucking up to.
  9. Work itself – I remember my first jobs in the restaurant business were washing dishes, and I hated it. It felt thankless to me, and I was probably not mature enough to want to work that hard as a young teen. Moving up in my career, I’ve always kept that in the back of my mind when managing employees. You need to make sure the job, no matter what level in your organization, is rewarding.

High employee turnover is expensive and disruptive to any business. With training and systems in place, you start with employees who know what their job is and what is expected of them. But to keep them long term, you have to be an “employer of choice.” If you properly address the majority of these factors, you’ll be one!

David Scott Peters TheRestaurantExpert (1)David Scott Peters is a restaurant expert, speaker, coach and trainer for independent restaurant owners. He is the developer of SMART Systems Pro, an online restaurant management software program helping the independent restaurant owner remain competitive and profitable in an industry boxed in by the big chain restaurants. He is best known as the SMART Systems guy who can walk into any restaurant and find $10,000 in undiscovered cash before he hits the back door… Guaranteed! Learn more at www.TheRestaurantExpert.com.