Great food and a welcoming atmosphere aren’t the only contributors to your restaurant’s success. In many ways, the choices you make in relation to your staff members can influence your outcomes. Certainly, it’s important to hire people you think can make a great difference, but how can you ensure continued excellence once they’re on board?
On one hand, you need to make certain they continue to act with the kind of precision that limits errors and supports efficiency. On the other, your efforts to make your restaurant a pleasant place to work can reduce costly turnover. Wherever possible, you should aim to achieve a balance between these two areas. By taking steps to improve both morale and precision, you can best affect your restaurant’s trajectory.
Let’s explore this concept a little further.
Keep Everyone Connected and Contributing
As a restaurant owner, part of the key to boosting team morale is understanding what causes it to be low. Among the common contributors are team members feeling disconnected from colleagues or the company and an absence of collaboration. Therefore you should take steps to foster greater connection. Importantly, this is also a fantastic way to make sure your restaurant operations remain efficient.
- When all staff members feel connected and encouraged to contribute, this can boost a sense of ownership of the restaurant. As a result, your workers may feel more inclined to positively impact the success of the company through their efficient working practices. Not to mention that they experience the well-being that comes from being an impactful team member.
- A sense of connection to other team members enables everyone to feel a meaningful part of a greater whole. While working alone can be dispiriting, collaboration can enhance experiences in ways that result in engagement. You may also find that a trusting connection to colleagues helps them adopt mutually beneficial accountability for their actions.
You can start fostering this sense of connectivity by checking in regularly with staff members. Show that you care about their experience. It’s also effective to arrange formal opportunities to participate in improving the efficiency of the restaurant.
Set up a meeting, perhaps once a month, to gather all staff for collaborative brainstorming. Discuss service issues that employees have noted. Encourage them to develop solutions together. It can even be wise to link participation to your worker rewards and perks program. Show them that meaningful connections and contributions have tangibly positive outcomes.
Reduce the Potential for Errors
Mistakes are often a reality in any restaurant. These might be failed orders, inventory mix-ups, or even marketing problems. Unfortunately, too many errors can affect the ongoing efficiency, financial health, and reputation of your business. Not to mention that if employees feel as though they are constantly making or being subjected to mistakes, their positive opinion of the company may drop. This is why it is so important to take mistakes seriously in the interest of maintaining a balance between morale and precision.
Reducing human error in the workplace requires a commitment to a combination of strategies and tech-driven practices. These may include:
- Setting reasonable goals and deadlines. Restaurants can be high-pressure spaces and when staff have to meet unrealistic performance expectations consistently, they may experience burnout, which can negatively impact their health. If they’re burnt out, mistakes may easily occur. It is, therefore, essential to review your business data to ensure that the goals you set are fair.
- Utilizing automated tools. You can boost positivity and minimize errors by adopting devices and software that automate unnecessarily repetitive or time-consuming aspects of roles. This may involve waitstaff electronically transmitting orders directly from the table to the kitchen from handsets. It could also include inventory software that automatically tracks and reorders items.
- Increasing oversight. Your employees will likely not want to be micromanaged, but you can reduce errors by ensuring due diligence. Make certain that your staff receives regular training so they’re confident in their roles and function effectively. Track performance and error metrics not with a view to chastise or blame workers, but to collaborate on improvements.
Utilize Relevant Team Building Activities
Team-building activities are so often associated with corporations that it can be easy to overlook them for restaurants. Yet, your group of employees is still a team that needs to be able to operate collaboratively. Not to mention that spending time together on fun and enriching activities can strengthen colleagues’ relationships with one another.
To balance morale and precision, though, it’s vital to focus on activities that are relevant to the restaurant’s functions. Some of the events you can use include:
- Restaurant scavenger hunts. You can divide your employees into smaller teams to follow clues and find objects throughout your business. This not only enables them to work together toward a fun common goal. It can also help them to utilize and strengthen their knowledge about the workplace.
- Trivia sessions. Create and host a quiz in which small teams of workers compete to win prizes. Alongside general knowledge and pop culture questions, you can improve their understanding of the restaurant business and your brand.
- Craft events. Host creative sessions for your staff, perhaps tasking teams of employees to work together to make items from recycled materials. Not only does this lean into the positivity workers feel from spending time with their colleagues in artistic pursuits. It also helps to build the creativity and problem-solving skills that can boost their performance.
Conclusion
By balancing precision with morale, you can ensure your staff continues to be positive influencers of your restaurant’s success. Ensure all workers feel meaningfully involved with your company and adopt error-reduction measures. Team-building activities every now and then are also great opportunities for bonding and growth.
It’s important, though, to keep a careful watch over maintaining the balance between precision and morale. Focus too much on either side and the other may suffer. Work with your staff and management to ensure that you’re serving both areas and make improvements whenever they’re needed.
