Keeping service industry employees engaged and committed to their roles can decrease turnover, increase profits and positively affect customer satisfaction. When employees feel like they’re a part of a team, they are more likely to take pride in their work and display interest in aligning with company goals. Here are four ways to jumpstart your efforts:
Simplify employee scheduling. Creating work-life balance can be challenging. Employees appreciate the opportunity to provide shift preferences and availability. Although you might not be able to grant all requests, exercise understanding. To centralize and provide structure for this process, think about updating your tech to automate scheduling from both your end and your employees’. Those programs allow for streamlined communication among managers and employees, as well as other administrative benefits.
Assign roles and positions. Service-related businesses offer many different types of jobs. Establishing scope for roles and providing ongoing cross-training shows employees you value their contributions and want to see them advance.
Encourage growth. Many employees strive to move up the industry ladder. When managers promote from within, they design a rewarding, positive atmosphere to which employees gravitate.
Seek feedback. Ask employees to share compelling customer responses. When management institutes an open-door communication standard, employees feel more comfortable relaying positive and negative guest comments, as well as their own observations. When you receive enough feedback to identify trends, thank the employees that helped you get to that point.
With more than 250 food allergens identified, and 15 million Americans diagnosed with food allergies, it’s no small task ensuring your restaurant’s food safety protocols are up to par, a must if the hope is to continue serving this large market.
To help those dealing with food allergies feel confident about their safety while dining in your restaurant, here are the key takeaways from an educational session at the 2015 National Restaurant Association Hotel-Motel show during which a panel of food safety experts shared their food allergen acumen :
Train your staff how to handle food allergens. “Incorporate your employees into your process. They start buying into it and feel more confident in what they’re doing,”says William Weichelt, ServSafe director.
A certified manager should be present during everyshift and directly involved in all instances in which food allergies are a known concern. He or she acts as a knowledge center for customers as well as a resource for employees.
Never guess. Speaking of certified managers, if employees are asked a food allergy question that they can’t answer, ensure that they reach out to a manager who can. If your restaurant cannot confidently satisfy a guest’s request, expressly communicate this. This outcome, although not ideal, is much safer for all involved rather than the risky alternative.
Make ingredient lists available to guests. They know their allergy better than you do, and thus will likely know the names of ingredients or sub-ingredients that may be red flags for them.
Sub-out widely used allergens. If possible, isolate ingredients or recipes that could trigger a common allergy. For example, P.F. Chang’s China Bistro now uses wheat-free soy in lieu of regular soy in all of its marinades.
Create a back-of-house system for allergen-specific equipment. Consider using color-coded, allergen-specific plateware, prepware and other equipment.
Invest in allergy-specific technology. Natalie Krusemeier, director of training for the 7-unit, Chicago-based Colonial Café, says the company’s POS system has an allergen key. When pressed by a front-of-house staffer, the back of the house knows of the allergy, and a manager then becomes involved.
For additional information regarding food allergens, reference FARE, Food Allergy and Research and Education group, and CHART, the Council of Hotel and Restaurant Trainers.
This article originally appeared on www.restaurant.org and can be found here.
Restaurants are often targets for online critics, so if you’ve gotten zinged by an unfavorable post or two on Yelp or another review site, you’re not alone. Some things can’t be helped, but how you handle the negativity isn’t one of them.
Here’s a game plan for dealing with online critics:
Call a full staff meeting.
Come prepared with a few negative (and positive) Yelp posts that are credible and can offer teachable moments to your staff.
Constructively review the feedback as a group and talk about strategies for improvement.
Solicit comments from both the front and back of the house to get the whole story.
Reinforce the mantra that either “we all succeed together, or we all fail together.” Invested employees are more likely to be committed to the success of the business.
Make sure everyone on staff understands the protocol for handling a customer service issue and has the autonomy to correct a problem in the moment.
Be sure to address positive reviews, too. It’s important to keep morale up by talking about what’s being done well and giving praise.
Claim your restaurant’s Yelp listing so that you can manage your profile and make posts on behalf of your business.
Implement a policy of responding to both negative and positive reviews. Keep replies sincere and gracious: “Your feedback is important to us. We hope you’ll consider giving us another try.”
Depending on the nature and legitimacy of the review, you could invite the guest to continue the conversation offline, and discuss options for correcting the situation.
While none of these steps can undo a negative customer experience, they can be used constructively to fix a problem area and reduce the likelihood of a repeat occurrence. More importantly, addressing customer feedback and learning from mistakes sets you and your business on the path to long-term success.
Americans may not have the most pristine reputation when it comes to eating healthily, but that may soon change as consumers are increasingly basing what to eat on healthfulness. As the demand for healthy food rises in and out of the home, the restaurant industry must adapt to fit the times.
Healthy Habits on the Rise
According to the 2014 Food & Health Survey published by the International Food Information Council (IFIC), healthfullness is the third leading driver of food and beverage selection, influencing 71 percent of consumers. And this shift towards better nutrition is not passive at all as the same survey concluded that at least three out of five Americans spend some time planning each of their meals.This healthfulness movement does not only apply to what is being eaten within the household, but extends to what people are looking for when choosing where to eat out. Research conducted by the National Restaurant Association (NRA) shows that nearly 75 percent of consumers are more likely to dine at restaurants offering healthful items, and when ordering, half of Americans at least sometimes use nutrition information to decide what to have.
A Few Changes
So what does this mean for the restaurant industry? It means boosting nutrition while maintaining taste. To help, Deanne Brandstetter, vice president of nutrition and wellness for the Compass Group North America, offers a few easy ways to improve the nutrition content of your menu items:
Increase produce on the plate. Fruit and vegetables have a huge water content, are low in calories, lower in sodium, and have no saturated fat in their natural state. The more produce you place on a plate, the less you need of other items. The challenge: making produce as interesting and craveable as your proteins.
Add umami with mushrooms. Mix ground mushrooms into ground animal protein to decrease calories, sodium and fat and increase fiber, selenium and Vitamin D. Let customers know about it. They’re no longer into “stealth health,” Brandstetter says. They want to know that you’re making your menu items more nutritious – and how you’re doing it.
Reduce sodium. Use salt as a “finisher,” rather than in every step of the preparation. Or, explore new salt replacements. In response to restaurant and consumer demand, food manufacturers are developing innovative, new products to reduce sodium. One example: diamond-shaped salt crystals, which are hollow inside and have more surface area than traditional salt crystals.
Improve carbohydrate quality. Use whole grains in pasta, pilaf, risotto and other dishes. Experiment with grains other than whole wheat, such as millet, quinoa and spelt. Get ideas and resources from the Whole Grains Council.
Create interesting, lower-calorie beverages. Offer house-made, healthful beverages, such as ginger water, sparkling water with fruit or tea infused with fruit or herbs. Serve juice made with fruit and vegetable purees.
Consider strategic calorie design. Create plates with a limited number of calories. For example, if you are designing a plate with no more than 600 calories, make sure every element builds flavor, satisfaction and craveability.
Rethink desserts. Instead of serving a large slice of cheesecake with a strawberry garnish, create a miniature cheesecake surrounded by strawberries. “The CIA calls it the ‘dessert flip,” Brandstetter says. Customers appreciate tiny dessert portions rather than low-calorie versions, she says.
Allow for indulgence. But on a small scale. Instead of a platter of all fried seafood, serve a few fried shrimp and many, many more grilled shrimp on skewers. “It balances it out a little bit,” she says.
How are you making strides to improve the nutrient content of your menus? Let us know here, or @gosirvo.
The survival rate of new restaurants is slim to none nowadays, and just about anything from poor food, to sloppy service, to ill-favored decor can be the kiss of death. BUT there are precautions you can take to improve the odds, so do your homework and read up on some tips straight from the experts.
Have A Plan
“It’s way more romantic to think you can open a restaurant by the seat of your pants, but in reality, planning goes a long way. A business plan takes a ton of guesswork out of the startup process.”
Michael Curcio of Pyrogrill and Ray Sidhom of Four Food Studio
Stick to the Recipe
“A lot of restaurant owners or managers will deal with each task individually. Thinking through processes and standardizing is the key to saving time and resources. Write it down, and refer to the steps until it’s natural. This applies most to staff situations too. There is nothing worse than attempting to manage a bunch of individuals trying to do the same thing, each in their own way.”
David Koji of DineAbility
Be A Team Player
“Be willing to do the jobs of other people at your restaurant. Spend a few hours a week welcoming customers or working the reservation desk. Fill in for a server in an emergency. Show your staff you’re part of the team.”
Scott Maitland of Top of the Hill Restaurant and Brewery
Trust Your Employees
“Early on I realized that I had to hire people smarter and more qualified than I was in a number of different fields, and I had to let go of a lot of decision-making. I can’t tell you how hard that is. But if you’ve imprinted your values on the people around you, you can dare to trust them to make the right moves.”
Howard Schultz of Starbucks
Trust Yourself
“When creating or shaping your restaurant, think about what would attract you as a customer. Be honest with yourself – would you choose your restaurant over the competition? Until you can say “yes,” keep adjusting according to your own personal dialogue.”
Danny Abrams of The Mermaid Inn
Like Danny Said, Be Honest
“Sometimes these things that you care about so much, you look at them and go, “It’s just not working.” You’ve got to be honest with yourself. If you hear a pattern of things, especially early on, about things not working, you have to look at that and make a decision as to whether or not you should stick with it.”
Tom Colicchio of Craft Restaurants
Keep Your Enemies Close
“You have to know who you are up against. The best thing is to make sure you create a unique niche in the industry before you go forward.”
Steele Platt of Yard House
Learn How To Handle Stress
“Stress as a restaurant owner will never subside, don’t kid yourself! Learn some mechanisms to handle stress – create a strategy to stay on top of your mental and physical health.”
Damien Scoditti of Brio Downtown
Patience Really is a Virtue
“You can’t learn everything in a year or two. You have to learn the basics. It’s amazing how little people know!”
Wolfgang Puck of Cut
Laugh A Little
“Especially when dealing with customer complaints or more stressful issues at your restaurant. Knowing how to smile and not take things too seriously keeps a positive vibe. The customer avoids a tense situation, and you deflect some of the pressure from yourself.”
Nicholas Lander, Restaurant Correspondent for the Financial Times
Celebrate the Successes
“As chefs, we are our own worst critics, and we criticize ourselves to death. We don’t often champion our successes so sometimes we have to take a step back, have a glass of champagne and say, ‘look at what we’ve done.'”
Thomas Keller of French Laundry
Stay Hungry
“Hungry means to try to learn more, always try to work hard, try to understand more from others, don’t be afraid to ask questions, make mistakes and learn from your mistakes.”
Nobu Matsuhisa of Nobu
Know any other restaurant success tips? Let us know @gosirvo.
