One of the biggest challenges in the food and beverage industry is hiring qualified and capable employees and keeping them around for the long run. The average day in the life of a food and beverage worker can be stressful, and using motivational techniques to inspire and support your staff will not only improve the quality of work but also increase the liklihood that they’ll stick with you.
Use these tips to incorporate a dose motivation into the daily management of your staff and watch them succeed!
Focus on the positive
Have you ever had a manager who put a spotlight on everything that was going wrong during the pre-shift meeting? Nothing beats people down more than only hearing about the things they have done wrong. The things that your staff needs to improve upon do need to be addressed, but addressing them in a constructive way is more likely to have a positive effect.
Try the “sandwich” technique. Begin by talking about some positive things you have seen in your employees. Maybe celebrate the successes of each individual employee. Then discuss things that need improvement. Then, conclude by thanking your staff for their hard work. By sandwiching the negative between two positives, your staff will feel encouraged, instead of discouraged.
Keep the acknowledgement coming
Have ongoing acknowledgement programs, like “Employee of the Month”. Designate an area in the back of the house where the successes of your staff members can be posted. If a customer writes a good review of your restaurant or the staff, post it there. Regularly update the postings, making sure to rotate through the whole staff.
Have daily goals
Create daily goals for your staff to work towards. Do you manage a steakhouse? Offer a reward to the server who sells the most of a certain type of steak. Does your restaurant specialize in fine wine? Set a wine sales goal for the server who has the highest wine sales.
The reward can be anything from a free meal to a gift card. Make it interesting by creating teams, and having your employees work together to achieve a goal.
Set monthly goals as well
If your daily goals are for a small reward, create a larger goal for the entire month. For example, set a goal for the staff member with the highest monthly sales, with nothing under a certain amount. The reward could be something like a $500 bonus or a paid day off.
Set up a continuing education program
If your employees feel like you care about them, it will show in the quality of their work. Investing in their future by offering further job training and education shows them you care, and it will increase the likelihood that they will stick with you long-term.
Provide opportunities to cross train within your restaurant, and if promotion is possible, try to do it from within.
Get your hands dirty
In a restaurant’s busiest moments, it’s easy for a manager to shout out for someone to cut lemons or roll silverware, but that may send the wrong message to your staff. Show them that you aren’t above tasks like these.
When it’s obvious a staff member could use an extra pair of hands, roll up your sleeves and help out. One of the characteristics of a good leader is to lead by doing not by telling.
Feed your staff
If you have ever worked as a server or cook, you know often it is that you go an entire shift without getting the opportunity to sit and eat. Provide these short breaks for employees to grab a bite if possible.
For shifts that are really busy, bring in breakfast, lunch, or dinner every now and then. This is another way to show your employees that you care, and they won’t have to try to get through a shift on empty stomachs!
The food and beverage industry is a stressful, but rewarding one. By following these tips, you’ll motivate your staff and encourage them to work towards being a valuable part of the team!
Workplace culture, from how a business looks to employee attitudes and communication, reinforces how an organization, or team, operates. It’s a fundamental element that can have a huge impact, whether it’s positive or negative is up to you.
Key ingredients
Businesses that have strong and positive workplace cultures have two things in common:
1. The soft skill behaviors that are high-priority are clearly defined.
2. Those high-priority behaviors are shouted from the rooftops, loudly and often.
And this is no coincidence. By establishing and emphasizing the key soft skill behaviors that are at the core of the business, or team for that matter, employees have a clear picture of what is expected, which leads to better performance in the workplace– even the youngest, least-experienced employees.
These powerful cultures don’t just happen. They are the result of a company that knows exactly what its high-priority behaviors are, focuses on them relentlessly, and systematically drives those behaviors throughout the organization in all of its management practices. The message is crystal clear and on auto-repeat.
Where to start
When designing a positive workplace culture, first ask yourself what are the high-priority behaviors that are most important in your sphere?
For example, if I’m the bar manager at a popular fine-dining restaurant, the high-priority behaviors for my team might be attentiveness and professionalism, which are applicable to the restaurant’s staff as a whole, as well as cleanliness as a messy bar is off-putting to guests.
Once the soft skill behaviors are defined, it’s easy:
Make them the foundation of your culture. Focus on them relentlessly, and systematically drive those behaviors throughout your sphere in all of your management practices. This means leading by example
Then sing it from the rooftops—make it 1000 percent clear.
And start doing everything within your power to drive, support, and reward those high-priority behaviors with every employee within your sphere.
How managers fit in
Creating and sustaining a positive workplace culture is not solely on the shoulders of the owner or general manager; managers with small staffs are also responsible for propagating the message throughout their own spheres regardless of whether or not the organization as a whole has a strong culture. In this case, it’s up to the manager to design a positive culture that will drive performance.
If your organization has a strong positive culture by design, then you need to be in alignment. Ask yourself:
What are the high-priority behaviors?
What are you doing in your sphere to drive and support and reward those behaviors in everything you do as a leader?
If your organization has a less-than-strong positive culture, then it’s all up to you. You need to create your own culture within your own sphere—not just for the young talent, but for everybody.
You don’t need to start a revolution. But you can be a little bit of a maverick. You can certainly be a change leader.
Your results will speak for themselves because your team will stand out, not just in its business outcomes, but in cohesiveness, morale, and retention.
Common roadblocks to positive culture
When policy and message do not align:
Some organizations are all talk and no action when it comes to culture. They have great slogans, but they do not drive, support, nor reward key behaviors among employees that are in alignment with the messages. If employees have regular run-ins with customers because management has very strict policies against, say, exchanges and returns, then it really doesn’t matter how many placards there are in the store that say, “The customer is always right!”
When there is a call for immediate change in culture:
We all know change doesn’t happen overnight. Yet, there are organizations in which leaders get very serious about changing their corporate culture—all of a sudden. It’s as if these leaders have an epiphany and realize what they’ve been missing and decide they want a strong positive culture—and they want it now. They want culture change overnight, by decree: “From now on, our culture will be ___________!” Fill in the blank: “honesty!” “teamwork!” “innovation!” But you can’t force culture change overnight. It takes time because behavioral changes take time.
When the organization’s culture lacks cohesion:
Of course, plenty of leaders pay no attention to corporate culture whatsoever. Many senior managers have never considered workplace culture until now, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. This is what Bruce Tulgan, CEO of the management research and training firm RainmakerThinking, refers to as ‘culture by default’,
“Just because you have never paid any attention to culture, doesn’t mean you don’t have a corporate culture. It just means you have a culture by default instead of by design.”
That is your corporate culture is simply the combined web of prevailing shared beliefs, meaning, language, practices, and traditions that have developed over time between and among the people in your organization. Whether it’s overall nature is positive or negative, cultures that are developed by default lack cohesion. There is no central message that defines employees’ overall mission.
The idea of putting work into building a positive workplace culture is not a new phenomenon (because of millennials). In fact, it’s just common sense: happy employees are good employees!
As a business owner or manager, it’s your job to make sure your customers have positive experiences when they encounter any issues with your company. Whether you run a restaurant, hotel, or software company, you can, and should, provide amazing customer service that will keep customers coming back. To do that, you need to make sure amazing customer service is a top priority.
The importance of customer service
Many believe customer service is hard to quantify because it depends on relationships. That’s actually not the case. The quality of your customer service is directly connected to your company’s bottom-line.
If you have great service, customers are more likely to continue using your company’s services, even if they have to pay more.
In the end, great customer service can differentiate you from competitors, help you retain customers, and encourage customers to pay premium for your offerings. Plus, if you run a restaurant, customer service ties into the sorts of reviews you get on sites like Yelp, as well.
The breakdown of customer service
No matter the business or team within the business, customer service is made up of the same components: the processes you have in place, the tone you use with customers, the content you provide to help customers, and the measurement of how well you’re doing. Let’s take a look at each.
Utilize processes
Even if you have the best intentions, disorganization ruins customer service. Thankfully, it doesn’t have to. This is where processes come into the picture.
When managing employees and delegating responsibilities that relate to customer service, you need to have processes in play so that your team knows exactly how to interact with customers and handle problems should they arrise. This includes specifying who is responsible for each task, how your staff is held accountable for their duties, the chain of command, and how to proceed when customer service issues come up.
For example, if I’m managing a restaurant’s service staff, I would have a clearly defined process for set-up, service, and take-down, as well as for problem situations. This way, everyone is on the same page about what they’re doing and how to treat customers and their complaints should they have any.
Don’t forget tone
No matter how clear your customer service processes are and how closely they’re followed, if an innapropriate tone (irritated, nonchalant, angry) is used with a customer, nothing else will matter because tone is heard before the actual words. So much so that sometimes it’s the subtleties that make the big difference.
For example, the following two messages say exactly the same thing, but vary greatly in how they come across:
Tone 1: Dear Sir, thank you for your inquiry. You will receive a message from us shortly.
Tone 2: Yo. Yeah sure. We’ll hit you up.
The latter may not go over so well if the call was in regards to setting up a reservation at a restaurant. The customers are likely to go elsewhere because, from the tone, they pervieced there would be no follow up.
Instruct your staff on how to speak to different types of customers and in varying situations. This will ensure that the message is being heard as it should.
Measure success with sentiment
Customer service isn’t any good if you’re not measuring it. You need to know whether or not it’s working, and if it isn’t, what needs to change. This can only be done with feedback. At all times, you need to be checking in to make sure that your staff is performing well and that your customers are happy with the service they’re getting.
There are a number of ways you can do this:
Speak to customers while they’re in house. Walking around tables and asking how everything is going can be a good starting point.
Collect customer surveys using survey cards or by way of a digital platfrom such as Survey Monkey. To increase response rate, try including an incentive for giving feedback.
Look to Yelp reviews, Google reviews, Angie’s List reviews, and other review sites.
Amazing customer service can make all the difference. Great service is about a lot more than business– it’s about fostering relationships with your customers that are long-lasting and mutually beneficial. As a leader within the business, it’s your job to make sure your company is doing all it can to provides experiences that delights your customers, exceeding their expectations with every interaction.
Controlling food costs is integral to running a profitable restaurant. At its heart lies the challenge of balancing the (rather) static cost of the item displayed on the menu with the daily variations in cost for its ingredients. To ensure this, restaurant operators and managers must think of food cost as a performance metric; by comparing actual food costs to theoretical costs over time, restaurants can maintain profitability.
Food Costs As A Performance Metric
To gauge how well a restaurant is managing its food costs, you must first understand what a restaurant’s Theoretical Food Costs are, based on current inventory costs of all ingredients for the meals sold, and assuming perfect portions, no breakage and no shrinkage. Once the restaurant’s Theoretical Food Cost is known, you can then compare it to their Actual Food Cost, which is simply the actual cost of all the food that the restaurant used for a given period.
The difference between the two is the true measure of efficiency in food cost control; it’s called the Actual vs. Theoretical Variance and reducing it to its lowest possible point is the goal.
How To Calculate Theoretical Food Costs
Theoretical Food Cost is what your food cost should be in an ideal world with perfect portions and no breakage, waste, or shrinkage reported as a percentage of Total Food Sales. To calculate it, you need the following information:
Food Cost for each menu item, calculated with a very accurate tally of the quantity and cost of each ingredient that goes into each menu item, including any ‘paper costs’ such as napkins, wrappers, and bags.
Units Sold for the period for each item, which should be easily exportable from your Point of Sale system.
Total Food Sales for the period, in dollars.
Theoretical Food Cost (%) =
[ ( item A Food Cost × item A Units Sold ) + ( item B Food Cost × item B Units Sold ) + ..] / Total Food Sales × 100
Because each restaurant has so many items sold and so many ingredients for each item, this is a very difficult calculation to do manually. If your sales data is synced with your inventory system, this is likely a report that can be run with no manual intervention. Ideally it is run every time you calculate your Actual Food Cost.
How To Calculate Actual Food Costs
Actual Food Cost, also reported as a percentage of total sales, is a measure of how much your food cost truly is. It’s a straight-forward calculation, but it relies on taking careful and regular inventory counts. The formula for Actual Food Cost requires the following information:
Beginning inventory, or the total cost of inventory at the beginning of the period. It’s important to note that if the cost of something has changed, it’s best practice to use the most recent unit cost.
New inventory purchased, or the total cost of inventory purchased throughout the period.
Ending inventory, or the total cost of inventory left unused at the end of the period.
Total Food Sales for the period, in dollars.
Actual Food Cost (%) =
[ ( Beginning Inventory + New Inventory Purchased ) – Ending Inventory ] / Total Food Sales × 100
How To Calculate Actual vs. Theoretical Variance
This is the measure of efficiency in controlling food costs; the result tells you how closely the restaurant’s Actual Food Cost was to their Theoretical Food Cost.
Actual vs. Theoretical Variance =
Actual Food Cost – Theoretical Food Cost
Although Theoretical and Actual Food Costs will never match, meaning your variance will never be 0, what you are looking for are trends when the divergence is increasing or when there are sudden changes. These changes are a signal to investigate the cause of the discrepancy.
The most common cause of increased variance (and higher than desired food costs) is inaccurate inventory. To reduce error, follow inventory management best practices. Another possibility is that you are wasting a lot of food. This may be due to inefficient portioning, spoilage, employee theft or error. The other, much more concerning, possibility is that the cost of what you are selling is out of line with what you are charging. Most often, this is because prices on the menu have not been updated to reflect increasing food costs.
As a manager, in a restaurant or otherwise, it is your responsibility to ensure that business is running smoothly. This ranges from how staff is performing to business outcomes. It can be a heavy load. However, there are still many easy and inexpensive things you can do to make sure your establishment is running the way it should and to prevent problems before they occur.
Get involved
No one thinks of the phrase “absentee boss” in a positive context. Being in the establishment is a good start, but you need to get out of your office and on the floor and in the kitchen.
Be seen.
Even if the general manager and/or owner are not, you can be. In fact, putting in the effort to be available to your staff and customers will help you in the end. Employees will respect you all the more, making your job that much easier.
Drop in unexpectedly
When I was working in the industry, my manager would pop in and out all the time. She would tell us that she had an appointment the next morning and was coming in late, then show up early and say that the appointment was rescheduled. After I moved on, she let me in on her little secret and explained that it was her way of keeping everyone on top of their game. And it worked.
The first few times you do this though, it may catch a few off guard. Give them some slack the first few times, but if they don’t shape up, you’ll know and can then do something about it.
Stop by after hours
You know those restaurant ‘spy’ shows where they go undercover to find out who’s behind the business’s shortages? Well, one of the recurring things on those programs is that abuses are happening after hours; bartenders are throwing parties, chefs are using your place for a pop-up restaurant, etc. Well, even though those shows are overdramatized, they’re not off the ball.
To ensure this is not happening at your business, especially if you’ve noticed something suspicious, go in when the place is closed, and do it often. For many restaurants, a drive by will suffice. No lights on and no parked cars are both good signs when the place is supposed to be closed. A similar tactic is to check with your alarm company to see when the alarm was turned on and turned off.
Hire an experienced person for the role of mystery shopper
Again, those ‘spy’ tv shows are on to something here.Using a mystery shopper can help uncover that which you would not discover otherwise. This can be anything from poor service and inconsistencies in food/beverages to comps, and more.
It’s best if your mystery shopper is experienced in restaurant and hospitality operations and someone you’re familiar with, but you’re employees are not.
Also, having your mystery shopper visit regularly will allow him or her to form relationships with your staff, increasing access to what’s going on behind the scenes.
Do an accurate inventory, and do it often
Whether you’re responsible for both food and beverages, or just one or the other, don’t just do an inventory on one time of item or before placing weekly orders. If possible, aim to do a thorough inventory 2-3 times per week. While inventory should always be done when the business is closed, don’t do it on the same days every week.
This is a lot to take on, but there are tools that can help. It’ll be worth it in the end; you’ll not only be protecting the business from unnecessary spending but also ensuring that business operations are running as they should.
Rotate staff between units and shifts
The more comfortable staff is with each other the more likely they will get together to do things that should not be done. This is a tough tightrope to walk.
You need to have people together enough that they work smoothly with each other, but not consistent enough to become overly friendly.
The side benefit of this is that everyone starts knowing how to work with everyone else, which is a plus if you have to switch around people for special events, staffing shortages, etc.
The bottom line is that there are several small steps that you can take to tighten up business operations and ensure that everything is being run as it should be.
Taking inventory is an unpopular task at most restaurants, but one that is critical to controlling food costs and improving profitability. Yet, when we speak with restaurant owners, many admit that they either do a poor job at it, or do it infrequently. In most cases, the underlying issue is a lack of structure around the inventory-taking process.
With that in mind, here are ten tips to help improve inventory accuracy at your restaurant:
Take inventory frequently. For some items it should be done daily, for others twice a week. At a minimum, it needs to be completed before placing weekly orders.
Take inventory after the restaurant has closed, or before it opens. You cannot take accurate inventory while goods are being sold. Whatever time you pick, stick with it. If you always take inventory on Tuesdays, but sometimes you do it at night and sometimes in the morning, there will be fluctuations in week to week results.
Take inventory before a new shipment arrives and then add the new stock to your counts. Do not attempt to take inventory while deliveries are being made. Items will end up being double-counted.
Clean out and organize your stock areas before taking inventory. Throw out items that have expired, move similar items to the same shelf and in general, tidy up.
Use Inventory Count Sheets. Have one for daily, one for weekly and one for monthly counts (or whatever periods you use) and standardize the items included and the unit (pounds, number of items, boxes etc) each item is tracked in. Changes in what items are tracked can cause large fluctuations in recorded inventory. Use a product like LiveInventory to create these sheets and track results over time.
When taking inventory, make part of the practice ensuring that items are being used on a First In, First Out (FIFO) basis. Older goods should be rotated to the front of shelves so they are used first. Additionally, try to keep the amount of items you have on hand as low as possible to reduce theft and spoilage.
Use two people to take inventory. They should count items separately and then compare results for anomalies. Pairing reduces errors and the temptation to manipulate results or pocket goods.
Use the same staff to take inventory. They will not only get faster at it, but they will tend to be more consistent.
If you use scales to weigh inventory and measure portions, calibrate them weekly.
Standardize what your unit cost is. The price of many items (like ground beef) changes week to week.
Use the latest price paid as the standard. It is the easiest to find and remember.
The most critical piece of the inventory puzzle is consistency. Using the same staff, taking inventory at the same time and counting the same items are some of the easiest ways to improve your accuracy.
