A New Restaurant

Many times the difference between restaurant success and restaurant failure is in the small details.  Your restaurant can have a very talented chef that consistently puts out excellent meals, but if that meal is served on a dirty plate, your potential success becomes a failure in the eyes of your guests.

I’ll admit, one job I have never held in my food service career is dishwasher.  That doesn’t mean I haven’t washed my share of plates and scrubbed more pots and pans than I care to remember.  Even in management and chef positions I have always been willing to step in and work through a pile of dirty dishes.

In most operations the dishwasher is the lowest of low on the pecking order.  Every crap job that needs to be done seems to fall to them.  It is your basic entry-level, low skill position.

That being said, in many ways your restaurants success rides on the back of these kitchen drones.  (more…)

Your management style can have a lot to do with your success in running a restaurant, or any other business. While people can debate all day long about which is the best management style to use in different situations, one thing people will agree on, if you get it right (or wrong) it can have a big affect on the success of your business.

There are a variety of management styles, and most effective managers use a combination of styles to handle different situations. (more…)

OK.  So here’s a question for you; is your ego getting into the way of your restaurants success?  Are you directly causing your restaurants failure?

Let’s face it, restaurant owners do have ego issues.  Even soft-spoken, seemingly unassuming owners have to have something inside to lead them to believe they can succeed in a business where so many other restaurants failed.  Not that this is necessarily a bad thing.  If you don’t think you have what it takes you should find another way to spend your money.

Where an ego can become a problem is when you are so set on being right in  every area that you begin to grind down the people around you, and when you fail to admit mistakes, even when those mistakes are costing you your business.

If you have ever watched the show “Kitchen Nightnmares” you have seen how egos have gotten into the way of a restaurants success.  Every episode Chef Ramsey is forced to confront an owner who refuses to change the way they are doing business even when they are obviously failing with the way the are operating.  The majority of the time it isn’t just menu or service problems, it extends to the way the owner is treating the staff.

One of the greatest assets an owner has is the restaurants staff.  A good staff, when properly lead can not only make sure your food is properly prepared, they are the ones in front of the customer, putting a face on your business.  when an owners ego prevents that staff from feeling like they are making a contribution, or worse yet, that their contribution isn’t appreciated, you are on the road to disaster.

Keep your ego in check.  It may be your business, but chances are great that you are counting on a lot of other people to make it succeed.

One of the things I have found when making adjustments to the schedule is you find out how comfortable people have gotten.  Suddenly you’re requiring more work out of your employees without giving them extra time to do get the work done.  For many, the first reaction is, “I don’t have time to get it done.”

When you hear those words, there are two possibilities to consider.  The first is that you really did cut too deeply, and there is no way to accomplish all that needs to be done at the current staff levels.  The second possibility is the one I usually come up against; there is enough time to get things done, but the staff doesn’t really want to wok any harder.

If you’ve thought through the tasks at hand and have planned carefully,  then be assured that more can be accomplished than your worker may be willing to admit.  What they are looking for is to see if they can get you to back off and either give some of the work to someone else, or rehire someone to come in and do the work.  Once they see that you are sticking to your decision, the complaints soon stop, and surprisingly, all of the work gets done.

How do you handle employees that have developed bad attitudes?

Sadly, even good workers can turn to the dark-side over time.  You don’t always see it happening.  It’s a slow change that happens over time.  Then one day you walk in, and you realize you have a problem.  So, what do you do?

One option is to fire the person.  A bad attitude can be like poison to the rest of your staff.  If left untreated, your entire crew is affected.  However, with the economy the way it is, cutting someone loose from your staff is a harsh thing to do.  Remember, the person you let go will need to be replaced.  You will need to recruit, hire, and train a replacement.  That takes time, and depending on the position, there can be a bit of a learning curve before the new personis really holding their own.  You need to determine whether or not the worker is salvagable.

Many times, the person is a good worker that has lost their will to be a part of the team.  When that happens, you can often turn their attitude around, and get them contributing to the restaurant’s operation.  If you catch the poblem before it becomes too advanced, it can be a quick and easy adjustment.

One way to do this is to sell him or her on your vision for the restaurant.  make sure they understand what it is you are trying to accomplish, and let them know how they fit into that picture.  Most of the time, if the pperson feels like they are important, they will step up and begin to take more pride in their work.

It’s no secret; keeping restaurant employees is not an easy thing to do.  For most of your workers it is a transient position.  Even your best employees look at restaurant work as a temporary position; something to bring in a little income while they are preparing for a “real job.”  It is a business that is staffed by young people working their way through high school and college, and for the most part there is very little loyalty.  Some of your employees will be willing to quit for no more reason that that they have a friend working for one of your competitors down the street.

At the same time, you have to realize that your employees can make or break your business from a customer service aspect.  They are the front line of making sure your customers are well taken care of, and that they remain happy customers.  An employee with a bad attitude can absolutely destroy the customers experience at your restaurant.

When you couple those two things together you can see how important it is to devote some time and effort into keeping your employees happy in their jobs.  That is not something that can be accomplished with a single event, but at the same time, a single incident can destroy an employees attitude.

In his “Seven Habits” series of books, Stephen Covey writes about the “emotional bank account.”  The concept is that you build up good will by making deposits in this account.  When something negative happens you have built up enough good will that your relationship is not destroyed.  Deposits are made by doing good things for the person.  It happens by taking the time to thank them, to encourage them, and to let them know that they are appreciated.

It is a series of things, both large and small, that will shape your employees attitudes.  For instance, last week a snow storm blanketed the Midwest and parts of the east coast forcing many business to close early on Friday and Saturday nights.  If you were in that situation, did you pay your employees for the hours they were scheduled to work?

While not paying will probably not be something that will cause your employees to walk out on you, seeing a small paycheck will affect their attitude.  It is another small withdrawal from the emotional account.  On the other hand, paying them for the time they missed will make a deposit in the account by sending the message that you are willing to step up and take care of them.

It doesn’t have to be a large gesture.  It doesn’t even have to be something that costs your business money.  It is a series of things that over time send an ongoing message to your employees that you value their contribution to your restaurant, and that you appreciate the contributions they have made to your restaurants success.

I recently read a piece that someone had written about a problem that every restaurant owner has to deal with: silverware being thrown into the trash.  The writer suggested that on way to deal with this problem was to offer rewards for employees who found and recovered the utensils from the trash cans.

While his suggestion seems like it has the possibility of working, the reality is, that kind of reward will have the opposite effect; it will actually encourage your staff to throw the silverware in the trash.  By putting a reward on finding the utensils, they will start putting things in the trash so they will be able to “find” them, and collect the reward.  While you may see a reduction in the amount of silverware you lose, you may not see any savings.  By the time you are done paying out the rewards, the program may end up costing more than buying the replacement silverware.

Rewarding behavior is a risky thing.  Corporations spend large amounts of money making sure that what they are rewarding actually encourages the desired behavior, and not some unforeseen behavior that is the exact opposite of what they want.

The process starts by looking carefully at what you want to happen.  This can not be a general result you want to achieve.  You need to be as specific as possible.  In the scenario above, it is reducing the amount of loss that comes from silverware being thrown in the trash.  However, the reward didn’t address that problem.  The reward was for pulling things out of the trash, not for stopping the problem before it reaches the trash.

The other problem with this scenario is that by rewarding silverware recovery with cash, you are eating into any savings you would get for reducing the loss of silverware.  Another option is to figure out a way to give non-cash rewards to the staff for achieving certain goals; in this case, for reducing the amount of silverware loss to a specified level.  In this way, you are rewarding desired results, and not a specific behavior.  there would be no incentive for employees to throw away silverware so they can later “find” it fo the reward.

Be careful of reward programs.  If done right, they can work wonders for your restaurant.  If done poorly, it can be throwing good money after bad, and that does not help your chances of success.

I hope you all had a great holiday season, and that you did a brisk business leading up to Christmas.  Now, with the new year upon us, many restaurant owners in the northern US are settling in for what has traditionally been the slow season.

With cold weather, ice, and snow, many customers will stay home in the evening instead of going out for dinner.  This is what separates the winners from the losers.  Success in the restaurant world comes from not only handling the busy times, but also in controlling your costs and battling through the slower times.  Sometimes that means making some tough decisions, especially where your staff is concerned. 

One of the hardest jobs for many restaurant owners is telling a good employee that you can not afford to keep them.  How you handle that distasteful job can have an effect on the rest of your staff,

It can be a hard call; do you work them till the end of the shift and then let them go, or do you give them a little notice that it’s coming, after all, you would want them to give you a notice.  The sudden end of the shift pink-slip always leaves a bad taste in your employees mouths.  The remaining staff will have their confidence shaken.  After all, the same thing could happen to any one of them, and they may not see it coming.  On the other hand, giving a notice opens up the possibility that the employee may not finish out the time they have.  That leaves you short handed, and the remaining staff will have to pick up the slack.

In truth, there is no easy answer.  All I can say is to handle it gently.  Treat the outgoing employee with respect.  This is a business decision.  You are not firing a bad employee here, you are laying off what could be a good worker.  How would you want to be treated in that situation.

Remember, winter is a temporary condition.  Don’t make decisions that will make it a difficult spring.

Yes, it really does happen.  If your restaurant has grown beyond you and your spouse running everything, chances are good that at least one of your employees is stealing from you to one degree or another.  It could be skimming a little cash from the register, or stealing food from the cooler, or even just helping themselves to some extra meal items.  Regardless of how they are doing it, it is a cost of which you really need to be aware.

Employee theft comes in many forms, and there’s really no way to completely protect yourself from it.  All you can do is to have things in place that make it more difficult for your employees to get away with it.

Types of Employee theft

Under-ringing or tearing up dinner checks after collecting the money

If your restaurant uses hand written dinner checks, or older cash registers that don’t print out meal chits that are directly tied to a server and a dinner check, this is very easy to get away with.  The way it works is, the server gives the customer the bill for the meal, then rings a smaller amount into the cash register, and pockets the extra money.  Or they might not ring it into the register at all, and keep all or the money.

The solution to this is to spend a little more money to purchase a cash register system that makes each server accountable for what they ring up on the register.  While this may not be fool proof, it makes it more difficult for the server to under-ring meals.

Taking food

This is type of theft is just what you think it is; your employees walk into your pantry or cooler, and helps themselves to the food that you purchased for the restaurant.  Watch for employees that need to run back to the cooler or pantry just before they leave your restaurant at the end of their shift.

A couple of things you can do to discourage this type of theft are:

Do frequent food inventories.  People are more likely to steal if they think there isn’t much chance they will get caught.  By doing inventories on a regular basis you will know very quickly that food items are missing.  With that knowledge, it is much easier to narrow down who was working when the food disappears.

Another thing you can do is not allow employees to take any part of their employee meal with them when they leave.  Set a policy that all employees meals are to be eaten on the premises.  Without having this policy, employees will eat part of their meal, then pack the rest to go.  This gives them an excuse to pop into the cooler before they leave.

Charging for time they didn’t work

This requires two or more employees working together.  The first employee in will clock themselves and the second person in, even though the second person hasn’t shown up for work yet.  The second person is now charging you for labor even though they aren’t working.

This type of theft is pretty easy to foil.  Keep an eye on who is scheduled, and make sure they are showing up for work on time.  When you are doing the payroll, make sure you compare the payroll to the schedule to ensure you’re not paying someone who was not scheduled to be on the clock.

Another method that I’ve seen done is to require employees to have their time card initialed by a manager at the beginning and end of the shift.  It is more inconvenient, but it is a very effective method of avoiding time theft.

These are just a couple of the ways employees use to try to get a little something extra.  In reality, there’s no way I could list them all.  Dishonest employees can be very creative in the ways they will steal from you, so you have to be vigilant.  Keep an eye on your cash and your inventory, run background checks on employees.  Most of all make sure your employees know that not only will they be fired and prosecuted for stealing, but anyone who aids abets the thief will lose their jobs as well.

Your cash flow is the life-blood of your business.  When people steal from you, they are hurting your cash flow.  If you loose too much, you can loose your business.  You can’t afford to be soft when it comes to people stealing from you.  When it happens, everyone’s job is at risk.

As a restaurant owner, you have to remember that when it comes to staff performance, you reap what you sow. You are the leader of your organization, and it is up to you to set the tone and the expectations for how your staff performs.

This puts a lot of pressure on you. Your staffs behavior and their performance is your responsibility. If meals aren’t coming out of the kitchen correctly, or your servers aren’t delivering excellent customer service, guess who’s to blame. And don’t try playing the “You can’t find good help these days!” card. There are plenty of restaurants that are doing it right, and they’re drawing from the same talent pool that you’re drawing from. In truth, the problem usually isn’t the people that are available.

I know that there are some people that are truly bad employees, but they should be the exception and not the rule. If the rest of your staff is performing as they should, the bad apples are easy to sort out and replace. The problem is, how do you seed out poor performers when they’re all poor performers?

The key is to not let things reach that point.

One well-worn cliché became well-worn because it works: “INSPECT what you EXPECT.” What that means is, if you have expectation about the way your staff is performing (if you don’t have expectations, you should), you need to watch them to make sure they are doing things the way you want them done. If they are not performing to your standards, you need to do whatever it takes to make them accountable.

Two truths you need to keep in mind:

1.) Most of your employees want to do a good job.

2.) Some of your employees are still kids trapped in a grownups body.

What that means for you is, 1.) most of your employees will do what you want them to do if you make it clear what you want them to do, and 2.) if you don’t hold them accountable, they will do what they want to do.

Once you get a crew that is living up to your expectations, handling the bad apples is a lot easier.