A great restaurant team will carry your restaurant to the top and grow your restaurant business. Unfortunately, the restaurant industry is known for high employee turnover rates. Maintaining an experienced team without guidance is difficult.
If your goal is to create a high-quality team, one that provides exceptional service, grows with your business, and stays loyal to your brand, then you need to master restaurant staffing.
Optimize your restaurant staffing and build your dream team with these restaurant staffing tips. They’re guaranteed to help you build and retain a great restaurant team.
14 Tips To Master Restaurant Staffing
Use these tips to dominate restaurant staffing and grow a team rivaling even the best in the restaurant industry.
Consider What Restaurant Staffing You Need
Before you fill your restaurant staffing roster, it’s important to consider what type of restaurant employees you need. Restaurants run multiple sections, most notably BOH (back of house) and FOH (front of house) restaurant operations.
The staff in these sections have different duties, so you can’t use restaurant staff as an all-encompassing keyword in your job searches. So, let’s look at the common types of restaurant staff you’ll find in the restaurant industry and their duties.
Front Of House Restaurant Staff
FOH restaurant employees manage all the customer-facing duties in a restaurant. Common restaurant positions include:
- Busser: A busser is responsible for clearing tables, cleaning them, and helping servers where needed. They move between the BOH and FOH.
- Food Runner: Food runners are responsible for bringing food from the kitchen to the FOH, where servers can collect it.
- Server: Servers make up the bulk of front-of-house staff and are responsible for serving customers, collecting orders, and providing exceptional customer service.
- Host/Hostess: Hosts greet and seat customers and manage guest bookings. They undergo specific training and should have some experience in the role. They represent the face of your business and always need to provide high-quality service, especially if you run a fine dining restaurant.
- Restaurant Manager: A restaurant manager manages the restaurant operations, coordinates employees, manages the books, and takes care of a variety of roles to ensure the restaurant is running smoothly. Restaurant managers are integral to a restaurant’s success.
- Bartender: Bartenders work behind the bar and their primary duties are serving customers and stocktake.
- Bar Manager: Bar managers' duties include serving customers, creating new drinks and menu items, taking stock of bar supplies, ordering more supplies, and managing other bar employees.
Back Of House Restaurant Staff
Back-of-house staff members are responsible for all the behind-the-scenes operations in a restaurant. Common positions include:
- Dishwasher: As the name suggests, dishwashers are responsible for cleaning dishes. Other duties include cleaning the kitchen and restaurant floor, keeping the area clean for easier BOH operations, and taking care of small maintenance issues.
- Line Cooks: Restaurants often have multiple line cooks, who take care of different dishes and sections in the kitchen. They work under the sous chef and head chef.
- Sous Chef: The second in command and kitchen jack of all trades. They help the head chef and lead the line cooks when need be. Sous chefs are more common in the fine dining restaurant industry.
- Head Chef: The top cook in the restaurant. They’re responsible for leading and teaching the cooks under them. Also responsible for creating new menu items and working with the kitchen manager to handle other restaurant operations.
- Kitchen Manager: The head chef and kitchen manager positions are often held by the same person. The kitchen manager manages BOH operations, including creating new menus, ordering produce, hiring new staff members, and collaborating with the restaurant owners.
Prioritize These Qualities
Next, let’s consider what qualities to prioritize when trying to meet your restaurant staffing needs. :
- Polite and hospitable
- Customer service skills
- Communication skills
- Emotional intelligence
- Passion
- Team player
- Patient
- Critical thinking skills
- Calm under pressure
These qualities are a major plus in an employee. So much so, that we’d suggest hiring someone with these qualities even if they don’t have experience.
Hire Through Multiple Channels
Don’t miss out on great employees by sticking to one hiring channel. Put your vacancies on multiple channels, like job sites, your website’s career page, and social media.
We’d also suggest using referrals. Talk to restaurant employees who you really like and who do their job well, and ask them about potential job candidates. It’s a great way to speed up the hiring process and find staff members who match your restaurant staffing needs.
Look Beyond Local Talent
Diversify your restaurant workforce by hiring restaurant staff from different areas. Open your restaurant job applications to other cities in your area. You’d be surprised how many great employees you can find who are eager to move somewhere new.
Be Specific With Job Expectations
Restaurant jobs are often advertised under the same banner on job openings and the like. But, as we showcased in tip 1, there are a variety of duties and positions in a restaurant. If you’re not specific with your expectations, you won’t find the right employees.
So, be very specific with the job description. List the exact position you’re looking to fill and what you expect the employee to take care of. This is the only way to effectively fill your restaurant staffing needs.
Ask Relevant Interview Questions
The hospitality industry has a reputation for not being as thorough during the interviewing process as other industries. And if you’re hoping to build and retain a good team instead of constantly cycling through temporary restaurant staff, you need to be more specific with the interview questions.
Use the interview to gauge your candidate's experience level, but also their goals. Are they interested in growing with your team? Would they be on board with continued training? Do they value the dining experience?
Provide Consistent Onboarding
Full-service restaurants should provide dedicated onboarding. Don’t rely on unmonitored peer-to-peer training. Instead, use online training, restaurant manuals, and dedicated mentors to provide high-quality training that levels up all employees and keeps your restaurant service consistent.
Offer Continued Learning Opportunities
Even if you provide spectacular training, if you want to develop and maintain a great restaurant team, you need to offer continued learning opportunities. Do a training refresher every few months. Offer employees additional resources to improve their service.
If employees aren’t taking initiative, incentivize them with rewards. If you get one or two employees on board, the rest will follow.
Put a Focus on Customer Service
A restaurant business is only as good as the customer service. In one analysis of the restaurant industry, “service” was the most used keyword in over 300,000 reviews. It’s clear: customers care about customer service. Sometimes even more than the food.
To build a great team, emphasize customer service during the hiring process and the restaurant training. Make it a core value among your restaurant staff.
Reward Good Work
Employee appreciation has many benefits, including higher employee engagement, increased employee retention, and increased productivity. It makes sense: if an employee feels appreciated and happy where they work, they’ll have a vested interest in staying and working hard.
Tap into this potential with employee appreciation initiatives. Reward good work with shoutouts, small gifts, vouchers, cash rewards, or even a day off.
Offer Fair Pay and Work Hours
Similar to employee appreciation, fair pay and good working hours are necessary for building a great restaurant team.
A high employee turnover rate is expensive. And unhappy employees are bad for your brand reputation.
When your employees are satisfied with their work hours and pay, they’ll provide better service, improve the customer experience, and stay with your restaurant for longer – all of which is great for your profit margins.
Have Regular Staff Meetings
Communication is essential when building your dream team. No matter how great your employees are, there will be conflicts and small resentments. The key is to resolve these issues before they fester and affect restaurant service.
Hold regular staff meetings and let employees air their grievances. Genuinely listen to their problems and opinions, and help them resolve these issues.
Provide Structure and Guidance
Create a clear hierarchy in your restaurant, with a clear division of roles. It’ll improve the overall flow of your restaurant and the restaurant operations. And it’ll provide much-needed guidance for all employees.
Employees with clear roles won’t have to worry about anything beyond their duties and will know which senior members to go to when they’re struggling with an internal issue.
How Many Employees You’ll Need
Not providing enough employees will overwork your current ones, increase the tension on the restaurant floor, and negatively impact your restaurant sales.
It’s critical that you provide employees with enough support.
As for how many employees you’ll need: a casual dining restaurant requires on average 1 FOH staff member for every 5 tables, and 4 BOH staff for every 50 customers per hour; and a fine dining restaurant needs 1 host per shift, 1 FOH server for every 4 tables, and 6 BOH staff members for every 50 customers per hour.
In Conclusion
To be a successful restaurant business, you need a great team. And to build a great team, you need to master restaurant staffing.
Start building your dream team by using these tips to find the best candidates, promote job satisfaction, foster good internal communication, provide consistent training, and a host of offer tips guaranteed to improve your restaurant operations and output.
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