How to Improve Productivity at Your Restaurant
Efficiency is an important factor for the success of any restaurant management. Aligned business operations make it easier to avoid problems that lead to losing customers, profits and sully your brand reputation. It is difficult to achieve excellent restaurant productivity; however, successful restaurant management has to strive to reach the highest level of efficiency.
Enhancing productivity is accomplished via excellent communication between al teams in your restaurant and implementing cutting edge tools to ease operations and unlock opportunities. 80% of restaurants utilizes operations to assist in running the business effectively. Using the right tools combined with full support for all of your employees will lead to success in today’s ever-shifting restaurant landscape.
In this article we will breakdown the four best way that enables restaurant management to drive well-organized and productive operations. As a restaurant manager you should start with streamlining the front-of-house operations then move to improving back-of-house operations while investing in the right tools and capable talents at the same time.
Improving front-of-house productivity
- Staff Training: part of successful restaurant management is to continuously improve your staff talents and capabilities. This is achieved via the right training programs on the latest tools and best customer service practices.
- Focusing on Customer Journey: it’s crucial for restaurant management to focus on the customer journey and optimize it to guarantee a hassle-free ordering process. Customer satisfaction is the main goal for any successful business, especially in the restaurants and hospitality sectors.
- Going Online: A website and app for your restaurant will make it easier for your customers to order and for your staff to receive and organize the orders. Going online also includes using cloud-based POS to ease the payment process, in addition to many other features and options that can increase the productivity of your restaurant and increase customers’ trust in your brand. Those features include; reservation systems and loyalty programs and many others.
- Constantly Optimize: restaurant management has to commit to constantly improving their front-of-house operations based on the feedback received from customers and data provided by comprehensive restaurant analytics.
Optimizing back-of-house operations
Your back-of-house staff is the backbone of your restaurant, they are responsible for the most important thing in your restaurant which is food. Food quality and kitchen and restaurant cleanliness are critical for successful restaurant management. To yield more productivity from your staff your have to invest in several training strategies and technologies;
Comprehensive onboarding program: Your on-boarding training should include everything that is needed from the employee. A detailed on-boarding program saves time spent on explaining operations and policies later on.
Customer-centric operations: your operations must focus on the satisfaction of your customers. So the more you learn about your customers the more you will need to incorporate this data into your operations and use it to update your process.
Inventory Management: Investing in inventory management software will save you the embracement of running out of stock during rush hours. Still, you have to do your research and choose the software the best suits your restaurant’s needs.
Restaurant Technology
Technology is becoming a crucial component of restaurant operations. Today, restaurant management can choose from many solutions to optimize their operations and improve the efficiency of their teams. You can find software systems that keep track of the activities and tasks of your team members and others that provide personalized customer experience and manage your online orders. All you have to do is identify the right tools for your restaurant and utilize them to increase restaurant competency. And before you choose the best restaurant software you have to consider the following;
Ease of access: Regardless of the features and options provided, your chosen software should be easy to use and conveniently provide information to guide your team while using it.
Moreover, if you choose to get an online ordering management system, you should make sure that you could use it to easily update your major operations such as delivery options, payment methods, and menu items.
Cloud-based: Another important thing is that your system should be cloud-based, which allows you to use it whenever and wherever. This is especially important for modern restaurant forms such as pop-up restaurants, Ghost kitchens and food trucks.
Useful Features in One Place: Further, an online restaurant management system should have several features to ease front and back-of-house operations. For example; it should provide an effective way to receive orders online and on-premises. It should also connect your restaurant with delivery companies to increase the efficiency of your delivery process. It should allow you to collect data about your customer and customize it to deliver a better customer experience.
Use the strategies above to build your own plan to achieve efficiency. Even though it is easy to get overwhelmed sometimes, you should always consider customers’ demands and industry trends when creating a productivity strategy for your restaurant.