Restaurants struggling to find foothold with accuracy, teamwork, timing, or quality often need a systems upgrade. Checklists are an easy way to start making expectations clear and teaching accountability in a structured document.
I learned this lesson early when I was 21 years old and promoted to management. I was sent to fix a location in my organization in a location where takeout sales were declining due to operational issues. Guests were routinely receiving incorrect or incomplete orders and had long wait times for food or service. I had not experienced working in a restaurant where takeout was such a large percentage of their sales mix, so I was curious how they could be making so many errors.
What I found was operational chaos. There were six employees scheduled during peak hours, but everyone was scattered and unsure where to be. Paper tickets were scattered everywhere, pizzas sat in warmers without labels, and employees were constantly jumping between tasks trying to keep up. I spent a lot of my time on the phone apologizing to people who had gotten home and discovered their order was wrong, and offering freebies to persuade them to give us another chance. Starting into my second week, I asked my GM to take me off the manager’s schedule for the weekend, because I was going to need a bird’s eye view to find out what was going wrong and how we could fix it.
What I found was operational chaos, and as I said, a couple of team members trying desperately to guide everyone all night on what was what. Mostly mayhem, though. Paper tickets all over the place, pizzas in a warmer (some with names written on them, some without), employees jumping into whatever spot they saw needed a task completed next, and me still getting pulled away to field angry guest calls. The next night, I asked another manager to be the one to take the phone calls with instructions to keep up the line of trying to entice guests to come back again.
The first thing I implemented was a simple deployment chart. Every employee was assigned to a spot, (Register 1, 2, or 3, phones, runner, expo, packer). I would be the runner for the first night so I could float and keep everyone in place and organized. Each station had a set list of tasks for that person. If you were on the register, for example, you didn’t move from the register. You would be responsible for greeting guests, placing orders (and reading them back for accuracy), taking payment, and checking orders before handing the bag to guests.
Every station also had side-work accompanying it, so everyone knew who needed to keep each item stocked and organized for the shift. I laminated the chart and posted it on the wall so I could write names in dry-erase marker for daily assignments.
The system built better clarity for the team, and improved order accuracy for our guests. We pulled out of the decline and actually increased sales over baseline by 9% that year, a fact that further boosted the employee confidence level.
Systems like deployment charts and checklists are a gamechanger for improving operations and team energy.
If you’re working on building stronger systems in your restaurant, check out a free downloadable version of the types of checklists I use with my teams and clients.
If you would like a fully editable version of these checklists, please check my store on Shopify. All sales help support my time in building a mix of free and paid content to help restaurant leaders succeed. I highly appreciate any suggestions or feedback for content so please feel free to drop me a line in the "contact us" section.
0 comments