4 Ways to Improve Your Restaurant Management Skills
Having great restaurant manager skills is imperative if you want your business to flourish and your employees to have great morale.
People don’t leave jobs, they leave managers, so what can you do to make sure your great people stay? These 4 ways to improve your restaurant management skills could help!
What does a restaurant manager do?
A manager will lead day-to-day operations and ensure the business remains well-organized, and a fruitful enterprise for both customers and employees. A restaurant manager must have the skills of a juggler, keeping everything from business reports to team culture and workplace satisfaction working in unison to ensure an owner’s creative vision for the restaurant can be actualized.
How can I improve my restaurant management skills?
Edwyn Kumar, Operations Manager from the lakeside fine dining establishment, Hart House, has given us his top tip to managerial success: Get clear on what you want to achieve and find people to help you achieve it. Trust your vision will be accomplished.
Get clear on what you want to achieve and find people to help you achieve it. Trust your vision will be accomplished
- Edwyn Kumar, Hart House,
Great restaurant managers thrive under pressure, as that’s when their business is flourishing the most. Refining your restaurant manager skills can be easier said than done, and succeeding takes consistency and showing up every day to realize the vision you set out to accomplish.
However in the end, investing time into honing these skills will help your business bloom. Here are our top 4 recommendations when it comes to improving your restaurant management skills.
1 - Stay organized on the floor.
Staying organized is an important way to make sure you have more time to show up for your staff, and work on investing in those who matter.
Building systems, or standard operating procedures, around all of your tasks and todo-s is a game changer when you have a lot on your plate. These checklists or procedures can be built out and followed around everything from dealing with a difficult staff member, to creating schedules for the week. Once you set up the checklist or procedure once, the next time a problem arises it will be less time consuming to solve.
Along with organization, be sure to consider automation. Automation can save you thousands of hours a year, adding up to a significant level of savings when you’re prioritizing tasks better. These tools are key because they give you more time to spend investing, training and motivating your staff.
2 - Learn to leverage software.
As a manager, you have a lot to stay on top of, from scheduling, to payroll and tax deductions. But a great way to stay organized is to use software to help you manage, schedule, and pay your employees! Using smart integrated software allows restaurant managers to save up to 40 hours per week by cutting down on redundant and labor-intensive tasks like manually completing payroll and creating schedules from scratch.
Such time-consuming tasks can become unnecessarily complicated, and human error can end up costing you in the long run. For example, if you spend $500,000 annually on payroll, a 2% human error margin is $10,000 in costs!
Similarly, with labor costs being a major concern as they’re so unpredictable, software optimization provides accurate time tracking for attendance and offers intuitive scheduling. An important skill for restaurant managers is to be able to make real-time adjustments to schedules, making work easier by eliminating the confusion for time off and shift swaps, as well as facilitating more open communication for staff to organize their own covers.
It’s essential for software to be easy to use and understand when you're looking at simplifying your workflow. Look for software that fits you and is specific to the dynamic style of the restaurant industry, allowing you to speed up your day-to-day operations for long term success. Push integrations offer a range of restaurant specific services like smart scheduling, payroll, time tracking and HR management, all in one platform that’s convenient and easy to operate. It’s designed so you can spend more time doing what matters most, while being assured that your manual tasks are being taken care of for you.
3 - Sharpen up your leadership skills.
Learn to give credit where credit is due. Work is tough for us all and we need to know our efforts are appreciated. A poor work environment can mean a higher rate of turnover, costing you on average $13,867 per staff member.
Disengaged employees are more likely to leave and less likely to engage customers, especially as consumer demands are evolving and disrupting the traditional service model. Perseverance and integrity are key to becoming a successful business owner, your passion will shine through to your team.
Delegating duties rather than commanding your team is key to holding them to a high standard and showing them how they can get there, without expecting them to instinctively know.
Learning and growing is a basic employee need. Gallup found that people who have consistent development opportunities are twice as likely to say they’ll spend their career with a company. Mentoring and investment in learning should be a constant journey for you as a restaurant manager.
Focus on employee strengths, as that will increase the likelihood for internally motivated engagement in a business. This means identifying the strengths of your employees and supporting them to make the most of those skills. Harmonizing strengths as a team creates an exceptional customer service performance.
4 - Work on interpersonal skills.
Communication plays the largest role in workplace satisfaction within such a high turnover industry and engaging and enthusiastic managers can combat turnover and encourage customer loyalty as a result of their positive experience within your restaurant.
Highly engaged business units have 24% less turnover, so it’s worth it to stay involved.
Being a manager means you are working with people, and it’s important to stay on top of your team's needs and concerns.
Consider pre-shift huddles to check in with your team in a calm and controlled environment. This gives you the opportunity to educate them on anything they need to know (specials, events, day-to-day notes), demonstrating your ability to be proactive not reactive when managing your restaurant. Software can help you address recurring issues in these huddles that have been logged from daily data organization.
Additionally, getting together like this is great for team building between BOH and FOH, enhances employee performance, and improves guest experiences through better communication.
The bottom line.
In our ever-evolving modern world, businesses need to adapt to survive, particularly in how they are organized at their core. Restaurant managers already had a lot on their plates—now, considering the changes the industry has taken on, it’s increasingly more important to refine your restaurant management skills in running your business, and understand the role technology can play in streamlining operations!
If you’re curious about how Push works and what we’re all about, don’t hesitate to contact us with any enquiries. We’re here to help!
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