Restaurant Social Media
Instilling ownership in employees?
Case study: You're not comfortable with the level of effort your staff is putting forth lately. You get the urge to give the "it's your restaurant too" speech. Is it a good idea?
I don't know if I'd want my staff thinking they owned my restaurant. While it's nice to think we can motivate people to behave like they owned the place, without actually owning some place, they simply can't know how to behave that way. Most employees see owners as lazy, and as someone whose job they could easily do, mainly because they have no clue what their job is.
If you are really looking to get something done that isn't getting done, the way to do it is through your systems. Add it as someone's job. That way you'll never have the "It's not my job!" excuse. When someone uses that line, the first thing to do to combat that attitude is to make whatever it is you are talking about part of their regular duties. That way, when they say "It's not my job!", you can come back with, "It is now.". The next time they see something that needs done, but it isn't their job, they'll be that much more likely to take care of it that one time so it's not made a permanent duty of theirs.
If you are looking to make your employees understand better what it means to be an owner, make them see the financial picture in your restaurant. Play the "restaurant game".
Have a staff meeting and hand each of the employees $100, representing your sales. Tell them you are going to let them know what it is like to be in the restaurant business. Talk to them about each of your expenses one by one, and take away a portion of their $100 to signify what you pay for each of those expenses. By the time you take $35 to pay for food, $30 to pay for their wages, $12 to pay your rent and occupancy costs, then dollar after dollar for each of your other expenses and taxes until they are left with $4 or so, if anything, they'll start to get the picture of what it is you go through. If you are loosing money, this is even more effective because you can ask them to pay you after you take all their $100.
Getting your employees to empathize with you is a very powerful motivation tool, especially if they understand that the more money you make, the more money you have to pay them. Further explaining how seemingly little actions, like helping to make sure the restaurant's appearance is up to par, directly or indirectly effect profitability will help to motivate them to consider things outside of their normal job descriptions to help you, and in turn them, become more profitable.
I don't think I would want my employees thinking they owned my restaurant. That's like letting the patients think they own the asylum.
I don't know if I'd want my staff thinking they owned my restaurant. While it's nice to think we can motivate people to behave like they owned the place, without actually owning some place, they simply can't know how to behave that way. Most employees see owners as lazy, and as someone whose job they could easily do, mainly because they have no clue what their job is.
If you are really looking to get something done that isn't getting done, the way to do it is through your systems. Add it as someone's job. That way you'll never have the "It's not my job!" excuse. When someone uses that line, the first thing to do to combat that attitude is to make whatever it is you are talking about part of their regular duties. That way, when they say "It's not my job!", you can come back with, "It is now.". The next time they see something that needs done, but it isn't their job, they'll be that much more likely to take care of it that one time so it's not made a permanent duty of theirs.
If you are looking to make your employees understand better what it means to be an owner, make them see the financial picture in your restaurant. Play the "restaurant game".
Have a staff meeting and hand each of the employees $100, representing your sales. Tell them you are going to let them know what it is like to be in the restaurant business. Talk to them about each of your expenses one by one, and take away a portion of their $100 to signify what you pay for each of those expenses. By the time you take $35 to pay for food, $30 to pay for their wages, $12 to pay your rent and occupancy costs, then dollar after dollar for each of your other expenses and taxes until they are left with $4 or so, if anything, they'll start to get the picture of what it is you go through. If you are loosing money, this is even more effective because you can ask them to pay you after you take all their $100.
Getting your employees to empathize with you is a very powerful motivation tool, especially if they understand that the more money you make, the more money you have to pay them. Further explaining how seemingly little actions, like helping to make sure the restaurant's appearance is up to par, directly or indirectly effect profitability will help to motivate them to consider things outside of their normal job descriptions to help you, and in turn them, become more profitable.
I don't think I would want my employees thinking they owned my restaurant. That's like letting the patients think they own the asylum.
Tags: HR, coaching, consultant, consulting, employee, management, motivating, restaurant, teaching
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Brandon O'Dell on -
There's a difference between empathizing with owners and feeling you are empowered to be an "owner". An employee has no clue what it means to have everything that happens in a restaurant directly affect their pocketbook, and I don't think it's possible to learn that feeling until it's your money on every plate, though the exercise I mentioned helps illustrate it. The best you can hope for is empathy.
I think it's a much more realistic and effective to have servers thinking they are servers, and cooks thinking they are cooks, and teaching them how their jobs affect the big picture, then also motivate them to do their part to improve the big picture through bonusing based on profit, and raises based on performance, with those goals and the way they are measured clearly explained.
Trying to instill a sense of ownership in employees is an exercise in futility and just confuses the big picture. It's one thing to teach them how every process in a restaurant works together to create more profit, then motivate them to do their part by sharing that profit with them, but quite another to try and make them believe they are empowered as "owners" without actually owning anything or having owned anything before. I see the "ownership" speech as a method to get people to act how they believe owners act, and in the vast majority of cases, that's not good.
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Permalink Reply by Matt Urdan on -
Well, I never wanted my staff to feel like they were owners, because as an AGM and a GM or a server, I wasn't the owner either. But as a server, I was very successful because the managers explained to us that we were not servers making 2.13/hour, but rather subcontracters running our own businesses. The restaurant took care of the marketing and all the overhead and provided the food. It was up to me to sell the food and keep my section clean and provide the service necessary to get my customers to keep coming back and to ask for me. It worked, and I made a ton of money serving.
The best restaurant I ran I was able to get all the others on the management team to buy in to this as well, and it's what we taught all the servers. They were successful, they were happy, they made more money than they did at any other restaurant job they ever had and our sales increased like crazy
In terms of the kitchen staff, in that same restaurant, we tied their raises to what they did to impact food cost on a daily basis. We charted food cost on a weekly basis. And over 6 months our operations improved, our LSM Program was successful, we raised sales 20,000 /week in our location over those six months.
My bonuses were bigger. The servers made more money. The kitchen staff got their raises.
It takes work. It takes organization. It takes systems. But it also takes having a stake of some kind in the results--and in that regard, the restaurant employees were acting like owners.
Cheers!
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Permalink Reply by Brandon O'Dell on
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That doesn't sound to me like servers acting like owners, or cooks acting like owners, that sounds to me like an effective way to get servers to act like servers (or what servers SHOULD act like), and cooks to act like cooks.
There's a difference between taking ownership in your own piece of the restaurant, and being preached to that you need to think like an owner. Teaching someone to view themselves as their own little business entity instills a lot of entrepreneural spirit in them, and it can also motivate them to meet certain goals if there are rewards for meeting those goals, but it is not the same as being an owner. Employees don't see owners doing the same work they do. It's their perception that owners sit around while everyone else works, and collect the money. There's also the misconception that all owners are rich just because they own a business. You can't teach an employee what it means to be the owner. You can however teach them how to be better at what they do, and show them how their role in the business affects the success of everyone (assuming the incentives are set up that way). You can teach them to take accountability for what they can control. It is very difficult however to teach them to see that pile of clean napkins they threw away as $1 as opposed to just a pile of napkins. That is seeing things as an owner. You can teach them to see that pile of napkins as a means for THEM to make more money, because in truth, that's all their ever really going to care about.
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Permalink Reply by Brandon O'Dell on
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You say "semantics", but I say there is a big difference between telling employees, "this is your store too", and trying to motivate them to work toward profit. The end goal is the same, but the devil is in the details. I'm not referring to ownership responsibilities that staff shouldn't be doing, I'm referring to ownership mentality that staff isn't capable of.
The napkin example for instance: Often owners will use that "treat this like your store" speech to try and motivate employees who can't possibly comprehend the thinking process for an owner. When they see that stack of napkins and go to throw them away, they can't and won't see that stack of napkins as a $1 bill coming out of their wallet, but they could be motivated to see that stack of napkins as a few cents coming out of their bonus. One view is an ownership view, the other is an employee view. One is near impossible to achieve, the other, possible.
Maybe we don't disagree in the importance of motivating employees, or even the tactics which we use, but I do see a big difference in preaching "ownership" of the restaurant to an employee, and teaching fiscal responsibility as an employee, not "ownership". One method, an employee doesn't have the ability to grasp, the other they do. To me, that makes one method ineffective, and an excercise in futility. Calling the practice, "Motivating employees to take ownership of the restaurant", is the difference, even if the tactics used for motivation are the same. It's like two people trying to get to St. Louis from Kansas City, driving the same car, and going the same speed, to the same destination, but one taking the wrong highway.
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