A busy kitchen at Chicago’s Adalina Prime | Photo courtesy of Adalina Prime
If you want to build a strong culture at your restaurant, hire a Miss Pat.
Miss Pat is a crossing guard at an elementary school in Florida, and she knows information about every driver who passes by each morning. Her personalized approach slows down traffic significantly, which used to frustrate Audrey Benet, associate professor of the Walt Disney Center for Hospitality and Culinary Arts at Valencia College in Orlando. But then Benet realized that everybody in the community has a Miss Pat story, and those stories span throughout the decades she’s been crossing kids safely across the street.
“Everybody in this city loves to drive through there because Miss Pat gets to know you. She greets you intentionally. She makes sure that you are good. She makes sure you feel like you belong. So, if you don’t have this personality, don’t force it, but find somebody on your team who can be Miss Pat,” Benet said during a National Restaurant Association Show session titled, “Making Hospitality Hospitable (Again).”
It’s important to find such a personality because working in restaurants is hard, so building a positive, even fun, culture is critical.
Benet asked the room full of attendees if they would let their children work in a restaurant. Few raised their hand.
“It’s not rocket science. (But) long work hours, terrible to our bodies, really terrible to our mental health, dealing with a lot of folks with either mental health issues or substance abuse issues, or a combination thereof,” she said. “We have some consequences. We would not tell (our kids) to work in the industry.”
But with high turnover levels, all metrics, including sales, suffer, she added. What’s worse is the industry’s workforce has been especially impacted throughout the 10 years with the rise of the gig economy, as those jobs become more flexible and therefore desirable. Population declines and immigration policies are exacerbating the issue, and Benet said the industry hasn’t experienced a workforce pinch like this since the 1970s.
“We used to be an employer of choice and that’s not the case anymore. We need to figure out how we’re going to adjust. We’re losing people,” Benet said.
How to win in a tighter labor market
To win amid such an ominous labor forecast, Benet said it’s important to understand your employees and treat them like you would your guests.
“We tell the server to leave their personal life at the door. This guy is thinking he has $298 to make today to be able to pay rent and another $132 to pay the car bill and he’s putting on a big fake smile for the guests. Guests can sense that fake smile, and they may not tip well, or they might say the service isn’t fantastic,” she said. “We are asking our teams to create experiences that they aren’t having. We know this, yet we don’t course correct.”
Benet said the industry should follow the advice of Restaurateur Danny Meyer, who said business, like life, is about how you make people feel. This is why drivers take Miss Pat’s route, despite slowing their routines.
“It’s that simple and it’s that hard,” Benet said.
To make it easier, operators should focus more on creating environments where employees are happy, rather than only on things like portioning and clocking in and out on time.
“We’ve lost sight of that one simple thing, which is treat the team right, they will take care of your guests,” she said.
It is critical to look at the four spokes of the employee experience, including feeling like they belong, that their restaurant is a psychologically safe place for them to work, that it provides clarity and consistency and that it provides communication, connection and support.
“The lack of belonging is the number one reason why people don’t stay after 30 days,” she said. “It’s important to help them find their purpose and to know what ‘good’ looks like. It’s hard to work for an establishment when standards are different at every single unit.”
To achieve consistency, ensure there is accountability throughout the organization. A write-up, Benet added, shouldn’t just be negative, but record positive patterns from your employees as well.
“People start showing up to work and doing what you expect of them. They want this. Find a way to embrace accountability,” she said.
Benet also said the industry has become too siloed, especially through the creation of front-of-house and back-of-house teams, which establishes natural barriers. We also have language and cultural barriers, different expectations and abilities, different levels of access, and so forth.
“We often create a place where we become afraid of making a mistake, and so my solution is to embrace failure,” she said. “The wrong answer is what helps you really take on the true things that are happening in your restaurants. I hate when we’re training the perfect scenario. Y’all, when is a shift ever perfect? Isn’t that the beauty of our industry? Chaos. But if we’re only training to perfection, then our team is never going to feel comfortable making a mistake.”
Operators can also better support their employees if they ensure they have the right tools in place for them to do their job. That doesn’t just mean spatulas and whisks, but also the right staffing levels and schedules, and the empowerment to delegate.
“When you delegate, you end up developing. When the team weighs in, they buy in,” Benet said. “We’ve got to create a system where our people feel like they belong, that there is psychological and physical safety, like they can contribute, like we can empower them. Support them, give them the tools, look at their expectations, eliminate the barriers as much as you can, be willing to hold them accountable and reward them, and make sure training is consistent from a management perspective. Serve them, love them, personalize the experience as much as you can, and then strengthen them. We have got to be willing to invest time in our people and develop them.”
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