Want to Improve Work Efficiency In Your Restaurant? Here’s How You Can Do It

In today’s fast-paced world, efficiency is worth investing in to keep customers happy, boost sales per labor hour and improve staff performance. But how can restaurants start improving their labor productivity?

Your first must-do in a fight for better productivity is staff training. As a restaurant owner, you should spend certain time and money on:

• Training employees on their roles
• Allowing employees to learn their roles in the kitchen

Restaurants that throw newbies into a fast-paced night may find that their inexperience slows the entire team down. Restaurant trainings are essential if you want to be able to keep efficiency at high levels.

Managers and chefs should work together to develop training so that every team member knows their role sufficiently.

Your management team should also implement employee productivity reports. These try and determine the output of an employee by:

• Calculating total output ($3,000 in sales in one night)
• Determining total input (5 hours of employee work as a team)
• Dividing total output by total input

With this simple way to determine productivity, managers will be able to compare one team to another and learn why one team is more efficient than another.

Don’t forget about the foot traffic, thought. ’Cause it’s a major factor that needs consideration, too.

Another important point is determining and leveraging employees’ strengths. One employee may excel as a line cook, or one may make one dish much faster than another employee. One of the wait staff may have an impeccable memory, so this staff member is best suited for large groups of people.

But there’s another benefit to helping leverage the strength of employees: cross-training. Employees can help train others on their strengths, working internally to be able to strengthen staff.

That said, we come to realize cross-training should also be conducted by the business as often as possible. There should be no weak cogs in your restaurant’s operation.

When cross-trained properly, it will allow:

• Hostesses to take on the role of a server
• Cooks to take on the role of a hostess or server
• Kitchen workers to take on a myriad of responsibilities

Efficiency will also be boosted because all staff members will know how to increase work efficiency because they have experience in all positions.

It’s always a good idea to consult employees on ways to improve work efficiency. Those who are in the kitchen or acting as servers, will know the best ways to improve efficiency. Managers should be sitting down with staff members or holding a meeting where they can stress their concerns and discuss how to improve efficiency.

Employers should also learn not only how to train staff, but how to create a sense of teamwork within the workplace. Workers feel a sense of teamwork and bonding when managers will come into the kitchen and take on tasks to ensure the restaurant is running efficiently. Even owners have been known to go into the kitchen and take over the role of a line cook or any other position to help staff members keep orders running smoothly. This is very beneficial for the business because it will help staff members work harder and respect higher ups in the company.

Another way to improve efficiency is to ensure that all team members have the tools, training and ingredients that they need to run efficiently.

Technology must be incorporated that will allow for optimal ingredient levels at all time. You can connect servers with a tablet that allows for orders to be sent directly to the kitchen staff. When an order is ready, the server can be notified to go pick up the food. Wasted time spent walking back and forth to the kitchen or yelling orders will be eliminated.

Average labor productivity should be considered, and it’s important to understand which factors improve employee output. It’s often the small tweaks that lead to a boost in efficiency.

Sit down with staff members, consider their suggestions, train staff members, leverage the strength of team members and consider all technologies that may be able to boost the efficiency of your restaurant. Over time, implement changes that will boost communication of the staff and keep inventory levels in a sufficient state.

Source: https://mcdonaldpaper.com/blog/how-to-increase-productivity-of-restaurant-staff