Restaurant owners are often focused on improving the customer experience in their restaurant, but what about employee experience? A bad employee experience in your business can increase staff turnover, reduce employee engagement, and ultimately affect your customer experience and even your revenue.
How can you make your restaurant an enjoyable and rewarding place to work? There’s more to it than offering free food, though that certainly helps. These essential tips will help you improve employee experience in your restaurant so that your staff can be their best for your customers.
Invest in technology
There is plenty of technology out there that is helping restaurants improve employee experience, increase revenue, and keep customers happy.
Many restaurants are using cloud-based staff scheduling software, business apps for loyalty programs, and semi-integrated point of sale solutions so that staff aren’t tied to corded POS machines and can take payments and orders from anywhere in the restaurant.
Empower staff with social media
Social media is an important marketing tool for restaurants and often offers cheap advertising. There’s no need for restaurant owners to manage social media by themselves or even to hire a social media expert. Instead, you can empower your employees by letting them be advocates for your business on social media.
Giving employees access to your business’s social media so that they can post stories and posts with food as it’s being cooked and served and ‘behind the scenes’ posts will increase your staff’s sense of belonging and engagement and create a more authentic, staff-led social media feed for your business.
Provide upskilling and growth opportunities
Plenty of restaurant employees don’t plan on being there forever, but that doesn’t mean they should be treated as disposable staff. Instead, you can reduce staff turnover by offering opportunities to your staff for growth and training.
Always look internally when management positions open up so that employees know that they can progress in your business. You can also offer training and upskilling for your staff too, such as management or marketing training for all staff. This will ensure you have well-rounded workers who can then go on to apply their skills to a range of roles.
Start an employee referral program
Employee referral programs have many benefits. The staff that you hire who have been referred already know about your business and know at least one member of staff, which can help them train and become engaged in their role quickly. And staff who refer other staff can be rewarded and will feel more involved in the business.
To ensure you get the best staff, you should set up an employee referral program that rewards staff for referring people who stick around. That means the reward should kick in or increase when the referred staff member has been employed for three to six months.
Communication
The key to happy staff is communication. Ensuring the lines of communication are open means that staff know what you expect from them and give them a chance to communicate problems to you.
Many businesses use employee satisfaction surveys to gauge how happy staff are whilst giving staff the opportunity to feedback anonymously. This will help you see what you need to fix so that your restaurant staff are happy and hard working.
