Who is killing the restaurant industry?

Chapter 6: Investigating the suspects – De Arbeider (The staff member)

By Michael Said

Let’s begin by clearing up a simple yet widely held restaurant misconception… Theft is not shrinkage! Shrinkage is when you send your tablecloth to the cleaners and it returns the size of a serviette. When someone decides to appropriate your tablecloth and take it home, then it is theft. Many urban legends abound about the restaurant owner who calls his staff into a meeting, “Guys” he pleads “we have a very big function tomorrow and we are short of cutlery and ashtrays, if you could all please bring them back just for the day tomorrow, you can restock your homes again next week”. If it wasn’t so sad it would certainly be funny.
No, theft is not the only manner in which the staff are strangling the life out of the restaurant industry, neither is it restricted to any level or segment of the staff, and no, not all staff are stealing (some have already been fired… just kidding), unfortunately it is so rampant and so prevalent that it seems to overshadow all else.

Let me not, however, be blinded by this one element and introduce you to Suspect #5 – De arbeiders aka The Staff Member. This highly versatile suspect may assume any gender, any sex, any race, any age, any nationality and have infiltrated all levels of the organisation.

A restaurant is a melting pot of talents and personalities and often it is an owner’s ability to blend and grow these talents that distinguishes a great restaurant from a mediocre one. Let us understand this, all restaurants draw their staff from the same pool of talent and all have the ability to train and develop this group.

“Train them? Why bother going to all that trouble and expense, when they will probably just leave?” is a sentiment of heard from restaurant owners. But what happens, heaven forbid, if you don’t train them and they decide to stay? Restaurants, like many other businesses in South Africa tend to place their most valuable asset, their customers (NOT the Johnny Walker Blue), in the hands of their lowest paid, least trained, highly demotivated and least appreciated staff members -  their waiters! Then they sit and wonder why. Why are turnovers falling, why are the expenses rising and why did they bother to get out of bed this morning?

Back to the beginning of the story… where most of the staff you employ arrived at your door by accident! They have no formal training, little or no experience and most importantly very few have ever been a customer in an establishment like yours. Now, heed this next statement because herein lies the rub… “It is impossible to deliver a level of service greater that what you have been exposed to!”

If you have never been served with care or flair it is nearly impossible for you to deliver that. If you are constantly treated as inferior, stupid and untrustworthy that is exactly how you will treat those around you and yes, that includes the customers. In serving your customers, your frontline staff will emulate the treatment they receive. After all, who do they look to too set the example? Don’t believe me? Picture this all too common scenario…

At the pre-shift meeting the manager is addressing the waiters and he says “Guys, just returned from a restaurant breakfast and you know what they told me? The customer is always right, the customer always gets what he wants, and the customer always comes first! Get it? From today that is going to be our motto, and that is how we are going to run things around here, which is going to turn our business around. Now go out there and let’s make them happy!”

Halfway through service a waiter approaches the manager and says “Table four needs a steak knife and we don’t have any”.

The manager looks at the waiter, raises his finger and sticking it in the waiters face he says “Do you know why we don’t have any steak knives? Because you steal them, that’s why! That’s why we never have any friggin steak knives or spoons and we always have a zillion fish knives, you see, you don’t steal fish knives!”
Cut back to the restaurant where the aggravated customer calls over the same waiter to demand a steak knife. “Sorry Sir,” says the waiter, “we don’t have any steak knives because the customers steal them all.” And of course, you the owner get to read about it on hellopeter.CON the next day.

Now, if undertrained and demotivated waiters were your only problem, life would be manageable. Instead there is a kitchen full of problems to contend with as well. Once again we are faced with a lack of formal training and little or no respect from management and now there is also the constant running battle between back and front-of-house. Ah, the joys of being a restaurant owner! How come the franchisor never mentioned this in the disclosure document?

Slowly grazing their way through your stock or just walking out with it, the behaviour of the kitchen staff directly influences your bottom line. A disregard for property, a feeling of entitlement, a lack of vision, no aspirations and lazy are terms that have been applied in describing kitchen staff, and while it is not all of them, it certainly feels like it. And for what you are paying, you were expecting what?

So let’s speak of salary for a second. I am not particularly interested in how much you pay and whether you feel it is great, fair, market related or all you can afford, there is more to it.
In 2002, I was offered a job at Mugg & Bean at what was then a very poor salary. The company was just starting to grow, money was tight and no one was earning much back then. I was faced with a dilemma, take the job I really wanted at low pay or “seek work elsewhere”. I turned to a mentor for advice and what she said to me I have shared with thousands since then. “We all feel underpaid, every one of us believes we are worth more, the problem is the day you feel UNDERVALUED. Take the job, feel underpaid but promise me, the day you feel UNDERVALUED, you will resign”.
So the question is not how much you pay your staff but how much you value your staff, and do you make them aware of that? Are they really part of your team? Do you share financial information with them? Do they know what your rent, gas and electricity bill amounts to? Do they know what a 40cm plate or margarita glass costs before it hits the floor? Do they understand the impact of wrong orders or expired product on your bottom line? Give them the benefit of the doubt, educate and involve them, they may surprise you and you may just surprise yourself. The doubters are already shaking their heads and wondering at my sanity, but the question is “What if you don’t?”

Einstein said it best… “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result”. Let me spell it out, the staff are not going to change, only you can. If after you have tried it, and I mean properly, and you still have the same problem, refer to Mike’s Rule Number 17b “If you can’t change the people… change the people!”

Speaking of rules, I have been delivering my “Keep the Change” training for about ten years now and I still maintain that there are only seven rules needed in a restaurant. So throw away the 238 page document and start living by these seven rules.

• Rule No 1 – Be on time. Tardiness is a sign of disrespect implying that your time is more important than theirs.
• Rule No 2 – Don’t screw the crew. Keep all relationships outside of the workplace, and this applies to all levels of staff and management.
• Rule No 3 – Don’t steal. It is not the value of the item that determines whether it is theft or not, it is the action.
• Rule No 4 – Don’t swear at people. You will hear swearing in a restaurant, live with it. But there is a huge difference between f#ck and f#ck you.
• Rule No 5 – Respect those around you. This rule applies regardless of their age, race, sex or standing in the restaurant or the community.
• Rule No 6 – Make money. Work the extra shifts, take pride in what you do and make a positive contribution to the profitability of the restaurant.
• Rule No 7 – Have fun. This is a tough job in a tough industry; find ways to play and have some fun!

If you were planning to print these out and post them, don’t bother sticking it on the employee notice board. If I ever kill someone, that is where I am going to hide the body. Not even CSI Miami will find it there.
Wait, not quite done yet, I have yet to cover the single biggest threat to the restaurant industry in South Africa - the disappearance of middle management in restaurants (and many other industries). Why has this happened? Think back 15 or 20 years when, as I once did, most waiters dreamed of moving on to management and one day owning their own restaurant.

Back then, when rents and set-up costs where reasonable, you could open a restaurant on a wing and a prayer, but this is no longer the case. The chances of working your way through the ranks to ownership have all but disappeared. Without that dream to incentivise you, why would you take the plunge from waiter to manager? For the pleasure of experiencing the aggravation, the responsibility, the hours and the stress at half the pay? Not likely.

Then there are our own racial prejudices, and we may as well get them out in the open because they aren’t going anywhere. There are still many owners who would gladly hand the keys over to a white guy with a criminal record (that they never bothered to check) than a black guy without one, and many more who still cling to the belief that if the customers don’t see a white face, they won’t return. These comments might make a lot of people uncomfortable, but it is a reality that needs to be addressed.

The only solution to the staffing problem lies in training… costly, time consuming, tedious and difficult! But what are the alternatives? More of the same, more restaurant deaths and more unemployment.
A word to the legislators… “Any labour law that helps cut jobs is not a good one. Minimum wages mean minimum employment.” I am not advocating cutting salaries and I am not implying we should pay less, I am saying that if a restaurant or any business is expected to survive in a free market economy, they need to operate in the same environment. You cannot legislate all the input costs and conditions and then complain about the lack of job creation in the country. Make up your minds, what do you want?
One of the solutions lies in a restaurant academy, and if there happens to be a big sponsor out there looking to make themselves truly relevant to the industry, give me a shout, it’s time for some serious change!

If it wasn’t for the STAFF, the SUPPLIERS and the CUSTOMERS… this would be a great job!

In the next chapter we turn our attention to the owners and after that we shall move onto some solutions that I believe will help turn the industry around, and hopefully help it reclaim its rightful position in the economy. □
Brand Strategy
Email:  info@mikesaid.co.za
Phone:  +27 82 449 7367
Web:  www.brandstrategy.co.za
Twitter:  mike_said_what

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