A restaurant is a chaotic amalgamation of different tasks and processes, all of which work semi-independently. Effective restaurant operations connect all these sectors and improve restaurant operations.
If a smooth-running restaurant isn’t tempting enough, better restaurant operations also come with a host of benefits. Reduced expenses, better customer experience, and increased revenue are only a few that you can look forward to.
If you’re interested in improving your restaurant operations, integrate these nine best practices in restaurant operations into your business protocols. Improve your operational efficiency, make customers happy, and enjoy the fruits of your labor in increased profit.
What Is Restaurant Operations Management?
Restaurant operations are the daily tasks needed to run a fully functioning restaurant. Restaurant operations include everything, from food preparation to deliveries to employee scheduling. The goal of restaurant operations is to improve the restaurant’s efficiency and profit – all while keeping customer satisfaction high.
The restaurant operations manager handles these restaurant operations and ensures all employees are on board. They often work in conjunction with the restaurant owner.
The exact operations in your restaurant likely differ from that of other restaurants. But there is a lot of overlap in the industry. This makes it possible for you to learn from other restaurants and improve your operational efficiency.
Why Should You Care About Restaurant Operations Management?
A restaurant is a business like any other. If the restaurant is chaotic and unorganized, operations suffer.
Employees won’t be able to do their best work. Food quality will be inconsistent. You’ll also waste valuable resources trying to catch up and maintain the chaos.
Restaurant operations management orders all these issues. It provides clear guidance to employees and ensures the restaurant is running at optimal capacity.
Optimizing the above operations benefits your restaurant business in numerous ways. Here are a few of the most common ones.
Reduced Expenses
Inefficient restaurant operations are expensive. Two of the most common and costly to rectify issues are bad customer service and food waste. Constantly trying to do damage control is much more resource-intensive than simply implementing good restaurant operations.
When you improve a restaurant's operational efficiency, you’ll notice fewer issues like the ones mentioned above – which naturally leads to reduced damage control and operational costs.
Consistent Food Quality
Food costs and quality are core principles in restaurant operations. By providing clear operational guidelines that cover hygiene and food prep, you can provide clients with consistent, safe, and delicious food.
Higher Customer Satisfaction
Higher customer satisfaction is the natural conclusion of better operations. A well-managed restaurant provides better customer service and food. This, in turn, makes customers happy. Not only do customers spend more with restaurants they love, but they’re also far more likely to return to and recommend your business.
Improved Brand Reputation
The restaurant industry is highly competitive and your brand reputation can be the difference between success and failure. Luckily, a restaurant with good operational efficiency is far more likely to improve your brand reputation than any advertising could.
If you’re providing good service, good food, and a clean and organized restaurant, customers are far more likely to recommend your restaurant to friends and family. As this word-of-mouth advertising continues, your brand reputation will improve – essentially acting as a reputation domino effect.
Increased Revenue
If you’re attracting more customers, improving operational efficiency, and reducing food waste and other operations expenses, you’ll grow your revenue.
Operations management is one of the best ways to improve revenue intake. Already, reducing operational expenses increases revenue. Combined with an increase in customers and brand reputation? Your earning potential increases drastically.
9 Ways to Improve Restaurant Operations
Cash in on the benefits of effective restaurant operations and incorporate these top tips into your restaurant operations checklist.
1. Do a SWOT Analysis
To effectively plan where to go, you must first figure out where you are. The best way to do this in the restaurant industry is with a SWOT analysis.
A SWOT analysis (short for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) examines how restaurants operate. Doing a SWOT analysis of your restaurant provides a clear idea of what you’re doing right and where you need to improve operations.
To do a SWOT analysis, first establish your goal, then assess your restaurant’s strengths and weaknesses. Next start to look outside your business for opportunities for growth and threats that limit you. Get the restaurant owners involved, and gather data from your employees.
Use this data to visualize your restaurant management and to determine where you need to improve operations.
2. Reduce Food Waste
Food waste is a big issue in the restaurant industry. It’s bad for both the environment and for business, so it’s in everyone's interest to reduce any wastage and cut food costs.
To reduce food waste, build a new kitchen culture in your restaurant. Ask your chefs and cooks to waste less food while preparing meals by cooking only what is needed and using the ingredients to their fullest extent. Ensure inventory management is spot on. Donate whatever food waste you can and take the rest to an ethical and sustainable composting company.
Reward employees for wasting less food and let them know why food waste is bad for business and the planet.
3. Keep Communication Open With Employees
Restaurant operation management means nothing if you can’t effectively communicate it to employees. Open communication is also essential for improving scheduling operations and other employee-related tasks.
So, provide employees with an open communication channel. Set up a group chat on Slack or Discord, or a social feed on your employee scheduling software. Employees should be able to receive and send information quickly.
From these chat rooms, update your employees on all new operational changes. Reward good work with shoutouts. Listen to employee complaints. And manage time off requests, shift swaps, etc., quickly.
4. Provide Employee Training
In most sectors of the restaurant industry, employee training is informal. A new employee is assigned a
mentor, who quickly goes through the restaurant operations before putting the employee to work.
Unfortunately, this method doesn’t provide consistent training. It’s also subjective, leaving you with a scattered workforce that doesn’t have clear operational guidelines.
So, create a training program that covers everything from food safety to customer interaction protocols. Make sure your new employees have enough time to learn and provide a mentor who follows the guidelines to a T.
Providing clear and unbiased training is necessary if you want to provide consistent food quality and customer service.
5. Improve the Customer Experience
The customer experience is critical in the restaurant industry. A lot of your success depends on how much a customer enjoys their time with your restaurant. In fact, “service” is the most used keyword in reviews, more than anything related to food.
Even if your food is great, if the customer experience is bad, customers won’t come back or recommend your business to others.
To improve your customer experience, consider all the touchpoints between your restaurant and your customer. What operations are affecting the customer experience?
Once you know which operations affect your clientele, like customer service, develop a customer experience guideline to improve operations and guide your employees. Make sure every customer interaction with your restaurant is beyond reproach.
6. Keep an Eye on Restaurant Costs
Cash flow and operational costs are often overlooked when improving restaurant operations, even though your costs are directly related to your business health.
As you start improving your restaurant operations, consider how you can translate operations improvement to your restaurant accounting.
For example, audit your restaurant and see which operations are cutting into your profits and how you can improve it. Calculate the costs associated with the back-of-house (BOH) and front-of-house (FOH) operations and how you can reduce costs.
Once you know where to look, what to change, and what you want to save, you can slowly improve operations and reduce restaurant costs.
7. Have Clear Operations Guidelines
Between the BOH and FOH, there are a lot of restaurant operations for employees to keep in mind. Without clear guidelines they can frequently turn to, they’re liable to forget what to do. Providing clear guidelines is the only way to ensure everyone is on the same page and stays on track.
So, create clear operational guidelines for your employees. This can be in the form of a small handbook, which they can turn to when they need a refresher. It doesn’t need to be big. A pocket-sized one with quick overviews is perfectly fine.
We’d also suggest putting up guideline posters. For example, a food safety poster in the kitchen that warns against cross-contamination and provides instructions for hygiene food prep.
8. Take Advantage of Restaurant Technology
As technology continues its advance into the restaurant industry, we’re seeing more and more restaurant tech geared toward improving restaurant operations. This tech not only ensures almost completely error-free management but frees up time for employees and management to focus on other tasks.
When it comes to choosing technology to use, we’d suggest starting with software. There is a lot of restaurant software to choose from – software guaranteed to improve your restaurant operations.
Some of the most popular options include employee scheduling software, inventory management software, CRM software, and event management software.
Give up on manual operations management. Incorporate tech into your restaurant operations to automate time-consuming tasks, and watch as your restaurant operations improve.
9. Track Restaurant Performance
Ensure you’re on the right track by keeping track of your restaurant’s performance.
As you introduce better operations in different sectors of your restaurant, note down the present data. As time passes, compare the starting analytics with the new data that you’ve collected. If there’s an improvement, carry on. If you notice only a small change or no change at all, develop a new operation strategy and try again.
Again, make use of software to keep track of your restaurant’s performance. Most restaurant software comes with in-depth analytics that allows you to track operations and compare them with historic averages.
Conclusion
Restaurant operations are the day-to-day activities that keep your restaurant up and running. If your restaurant operations aren’t well organized or consistent, it can spell bad news for your revenue and brand reputation.
Instead, adopt these best practices to improve your restaurant operations. These tips will help you automate and improve your restaurant operations and cash in on the benefits of efficient and effective operations.
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