Serving delicious food that’s properly cooked is important. But it’s only part of your efforts as a restaurant manager. What’s also important is having staff that’s consistently managing, preparing, and serving your food.
Your restaurant could be running smoothly on a regular basis, which is great. But what happens when it gets busy during a Friday night rush or Sunday brunch? How can you help motivate your staff to do their best and provide the best service?
Making sure that your employees are productive can be a challenging task if you’re not always at the front of the house. It’s important to work on your labor and restaurant manager skills, so your efforts brush off on your employees. Your efforts as a restaurant manager should be to implement each of these tips to improve productivity especially things like POS updates and task preparation.
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Employ the Right Staff at the Right Times
Behind every successful restaurant is successful staff members. When you have employees, who are eager and motivated to work, it’s going to greatly improve restaurant productivity. It’s better than having people who are just there for the tips or a paycheck. This means you’ll have to focus on labor management.
During the busiest times of the day, you need to have enough employees on staff. Otherwise, you’ll end up stretching your staff too far. They’ll become exhausted, frustrated, and unmotivated – all of which can decrease restaurant productivity levels. But if you have too many employees, most of them will end up standing around.
The key to effective labor management is to have the right number of employees during each assigned shift. With this sales data, you’ll uncover trends for each of your busy shifts. You can also schedule the number of employees you need during a given time period. Your customers will be happy with the service they receive, and your employees will be more productive to work.
Handle Your Inventory Levels
It can be hard to maintain a productive restaurant without the right equipment, ingredients, or supplies. Handling your inventory can be a challenging and time-consuming process. Forcing your employees to manage inventory levels can decrease productivity levels. The secret to restaurant management is investing in new POS software for restaurants.
POS is short for Point-of-Sale software. You should swap out the pen and pencil method for an improved system. The Point-of-Sale software makes your orders and transactions easier. It can also help you prepare an invoice for your customer and provides you with plenty of options for your customers to make payments.
Everything can be entered in the new POS software for restaurants the moment they arrive. As soon as you place an order, the inventory levels are automatically adjusted. This provides you with real-time data of your inventory levels and prevents staff from maintaining inventory levels.
Equip Employees with the Right Training
As you know, ongoing training and education are not cheap. But taking the time to educate your employees can give you the skills you need to increase restaurant productivity levels Creating a comprehensive and thorough training program can improve productivity and provide a better customer service experience for your customers. The right kind of training can increase expectations and standards that you placed for them.
Improve the Order & Checkout Process
If you use multiple suppliers, then you know that ordering supplies is also a time-consuming process. There are automated services that can help with automating this process. Instead of ordering one at a time, you can place several orders at once. Reducing the time, it takes to place an order allows you to focus on other tasks, such as customer service and employee relations.
The next step is to improve the checkout process. Most restaurants now accept Apple Pay, Google Wallet, and Samsung Pay. This allows your customers to pay with their smartphones. If you own a sit-down restaurant, you can allow your customers to order and pay from tablets that are at the table. Your staff can focus on providing the best customer service.
Promote a Culture of Open Communication
Your staff should feel comfortable sharing their concerns and opinions. You also should encourage them to provide feedback, which could help increase restaurant productivity. Some employees fear that if they share their opinion, their management may be insulted, and they could lose their job. There are also employees who feel that their ideas and suggestions shouldn’t be heard at all.
Since you can’t see everything that’s going on with your business, you should make sure your employees feel comfortable with you so they can voice their concerns. This allows your employees to promote new ideas that can help you make decisions and increase efficiency.
Increasing restaurant productivity doesn’t have to be difficult. Implementing some or all of these practices can improve restaurant management.
