Written by Bernie Vogel
Serve from the right, take from the left. Fill wine glasses to their widest point. Just say thank you to any Chick-fil-A associate and you’ll be greeted with a smile and their signature response, “It’s my pleasure!” Good service is not an accident. After the Three Restaurant Golden Rules – Location! Location! Location! – staff training comes in strong at number four. A disappointing dish is much easier to overlook when the service is warm and friendly, but bad service will ruin a great meal and almost guarantee your guest won’t return.
Front of the house or back of the house, success starts and ends with good employees and good employees are trained not born. One of my favorite quotes from Benjamin Franklin really drives this critical point home “Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” Setting clear expectations is paramount to good employee performance, but an employee handbook alone isn’t enough. Training is an ongoing process not an event.
Training begins with culture, and starts with “What business are we really in?” When I welcome a new hire, I explain that “we are not in the bakery business, we’re in the make people happy business!” That’s our culture. On the rear of our big dining room menu sign in plain view of every Croo member (not the guests) is the “JeannieBird Six”, our guiding principles of service: 1. Please 2. Thank you. 3. Hello. 4. Goodbye 5. Smile 6. What’s your name? These tenets support our culture and explain HOW we serve, not WHAT we serve.
After culture, comes mechanics. The WAY we serve, the WAY we prep, the WAY we plate, the WAY we clean. Techniques and processes are the involvement. Scouting has a very simple teaching model that is also a great fit in the hospitality business called EDGE; Explain, Demonstrate, Guide and Evaluate. Seasoned, tenured employees explain and demonstrate the WAY things are done to achieve the desired outcome, an employee who is ready for service. Turn ten chefs loose in a kitchen, and your going to get ten different crab cakes, and we all know our guests expect and deserve consistency. Today’s POS systems, like Toast, have features like product descriptions and pics so servers can describe menu items correctly and the kitchen staff can plate them properly and consistently.
Communication is the nervous system that connects the restaurant family; chefs, servers and managers. Restaurants that serve two or three meals per day have a difficult time gathering the entire staff together for employee meetings, so “spreading the word” about policy changes, upcoming events or menu changes can be spotty. We use a scheduling app called When I Work that empowers employees to review their schedule, swap shifts and receive up to the minute information from our chefs and team leaders right from their phones. Evolvement and empowerment!
Giving your staff feedback is essential to insuring that they know HOW they are doing in meeting expectations. Evaluation and course corrections are often necessary and maybe even expected, but a well landed attaboy brings a smile (see tenet 5) just like a well earned, generous tip. A team who knows what to do and how you want it done supported by good leadership, solid earnings and appreciation sets the table for a happy staff, minimizes turnover and… happy customers.
