For most of the world, the weekend means lazy afternoons spent relaxing with friends and family or sleeping in to catch up on missed rest throughout the week. But what about restaurant chefs or waiters? From complaining guests and noisy kids to managers watching their every move and arguing with vendors due to late shipments for food deliveries—restaurant employees don’t get to enjoy their weekend in the same way.
The food industry is extremely tough on its workers. As the leader of your team, it’s up to you to come up with ways that can help decrease the burden on your employees and provide them with ways to cope. Along with encouraging greater productivity and training them to build up their patience with demanding customers, you’ll also be helping improve your staff’s long-term wellbeing. Here are some ways you can help your team unwind!
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Provide de-stressing tools to your employees
Employees sometimes require a more direct approach when it comes to de-stressing methods. Whether you’ve had to return an entire batch of stale vegetables to your food vendor, or they’ve had a messy encounter with a guest, your employees can benefit from simple tools that help them manage their stress at the moment.
Stress balls are great for unwinding, especially when things get too heated in the kitchen—both literally and metaphorically. You can also add a small lounging area for your staff to get some moments of peace and quiet during their breaks or invest in a portable massager to help them with sore necks and arms.
Make sure your staff takes enough breaks
Sometimes, it’s what you can’t do, more than what you can, that makes a difference. If you want greater productivity, health, and balance in your restaurant staff, you need to make sure that they get regular breaks. This doesn’t just entail a five-minute break to get a glass of water—it means proper half-hour breaks where they can have their lunch and chat to their coworkers and just escape from their chaotic surroundings.
Create a schedule that allows enough time for everyone to get some rest throughout the day since not everyone can take a break at once.
Keep staff on deck
Having a lack of employees on a busy day is a surefire way to stress everyone out at the restaurant. Peak hours bring enough tension already, but not having enough people to deal with the guests can amplify the negative atmosphere.
Prevention is always better than cure—make sure you always have enough people on hand to cover any crowded shifts in case someone on your team needs a day off or gets sick. Being understaffed can lead to a bad guest experience and higher staff turnover.
Provide help to stressed workers
You can’t always be prepared for every possible stressful or unpleasant scenario. Sometimes, your employees may be stressed due to different reasons and might bring that stress into work. Whether they’re going through difficult times in their personal lives or aren’t getting enough family time, a tense and crowded restaurant will only exacerbate the tension.
Make sure to let your employees know that they can take a day off to take care of their mental health and manage their stress. Provide them with access to one-on-one counseling if they need advice on managing their stress in a more efficient manner.
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Maintain an organized process
Do you often find your staff frantically running around to accept a new delivery of ingredients at the door while there are hungry customers waiting to be fed inside? Do you need to take care of overbooking issues or misplaced reservations way too many times in a week? What about stocking the restaurant bathrooms and making sure their hygiene is maintained? There are too many different aspects of successfully running a restaurant. It’s not surprising that one or two of them get neglected.
This might result in your employees struggling to calm down agitated guests who don’t have their reservations, and more workers need to leave their stations to bring in the goods from the vendor, and all the while, you’re risking a health inspection due to the lack of soap in the bathroom. You need to map out some policies and detailed guidelines for every process in running the restaurant to prevent these disasters.
Digital tools like restaurant management software can help you make reservations, create a rigorous schedule for deliveries, menu changes, and stocking, and always have someone who can answer the phone.
Benefits of a POS system for restaurants
A POS system can help you save time and money and allow you to spend more of your precious time serving your customers instead of sifting through receipts and struggling to calculate your inventory.
1. Track your money: A POS system can help you create proper cash management reports that include register reports, overages/shortages, and other important details. This data is essential for keeping your employees accountable for the money that they handle during their time here.
2. Ease your inventory management: One of the most difficult parts of running a restaurant is tracking the food and inventory costs. It’s vital to the business to know the quantities of different products according to their daily or seasonal use in order to avoid under or overstocking.
3. Improved satisfaction: Restaurant POS systems can make taking orders much simpler and faster. It can significantly improve customer satisfaction when they get the right order on time, every time.
4. Go mobile: It’s easier to go mobile with a POS in place—tablet devices can decrease errors in order-taking and cut down waiting times, improving the overall efficiency of the kitchen staff since they won’t have to remake dishes.
Get the best restaurant management software!
MenuCRM is a food ordering software for restaurants that incorporates a loyalty program software as part of its POS system for restaurants. It’s one of the best restaurant CRM systems available for customer tracking and restaurant management! You can significantly ease the stress of running your restaurant and take a huge load off of your staff’s shoulders by getting a restaurant inventory app software.
You can keep connected with your customers, get SEO-optimized social media, create an easy-to-edit dynamic menu, and provide rewards to loyal customers, all from one software!
Get a personalized demo to see how it works and contact us to get more details about our innovative software.
