People are the foundation of a business. You want to make sure you are getting the right people but you also want to make sure you are fostering improvement in them. Being a good leader means being a good mentor and having the ability to develop yourself and your staff. Having one bad person on your team can negatively impact your customer’s experience, so being able to have a continuous feedback loop is essential to make sure everyone is performing to the best of their abilities.

What is a continuous feedback loop?

This is a fancy way of saying that you should constantly be checking in with your employees and letting them know what they are doing well on, and what areas they can improve in. This also includes receiving feedback from your staff about what you could be doing better, what menu items should be changed, what customers are saying and so on. It’s tremendously important to have time set aside where you and your staff can talk about what can be done better.

Instead of just telling your staff “this is how you should do it” ask them what strategies are working for them to save them time and effort and make those suggestions to other members who may need some extra help. It makes it more of a collaborative effort and then people can tweak strategies to be more efficient based on how they operate best instead of you making a sweeping declaration of how things should be done that might not be the best tactic for all your staff.

Millennials

It shouldn’t be a dirty word, they are a bulk of the work force in restaurants and they flourish with this kind of system. Most millennial workers seek constant feedback, both good and bad, so they know where to adjust and what is working well. It’s a product of growing up in the social media age and having instant feedback on everything they do. But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. This is just another opportunity you can take to improve your staff and your restaurant.

Set Objectives

As business owners we have goals, maybe they are only in our heads but they are still there. So, when it comes to managing people how do you set these goals? When it comes to the restaurant industry you really need to first start with what your target is as a business. Are you trying to expand? Decrease labor costs? Increase sales? Once you define what your goals are and where you are going, now you can start planning how you can go about doing that. With this as a jumping off point you can start choosing how you want to hire, how you want to train, how you will make job descriptions and how you will give feedback.

Roles

Knowing what feedback to give starts with having set definitions of what you expect from each role in your restaurant. Once you know what your servers, bussers, etc. need to be doing you can give your staff tangible instructions of what you expect from them and they then know what target they need to hit. You may lump roles together, and that is fine, but if you are going to do that then you need to be upfront about your expectations.

Know your team

You’ve made your expectations clear about what you want from your team, now turn that around and ask them what they expect from this job. This creates the continuous feedback loop. Take some time to find out if your server wants to work their way up to manager one day, or someone hopes to open his/her own restaurant at some point, maybe they are just working their way through college. Ask what each employee is looking for and what makes them come to work. From this point you can tailor your feedback to them so that you can assist them in bettering themselves. Yes, they are there to do a job and you have set those expectations and there is no point in them being there if they can’t manage those expectations. However, knowing where they are coming from can help you throw in little extras where you can that can help them learn what they want to learn too.

Initiate the feed back

You know what you need to do but how do you initiate the feedback cycle? First, you should be giving micro feedback constantly. If you see someone do a good job, say so.  At the pre-shift meeting, tell the group what went wrong yesterday and how it can be improved today. This is a great upkeep method but to insure you are really fixing issues, set a bimonthly, quarterly, twice a year, whatever schedule where you sit down with each employee and tell them exactly what points in your expectations they are doing well on, and what needs work. Be sure to write these things down somewhere you can look it up later so you can see if improvement is happening.

People like feedback, especially positive feedback. So, give it out! Remember that in this life we are all growing and improving together. As a leader it is your job to help facilitate growth in your staff and accept the lessons they have to teach you as well.

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