5 Simple Tips to Keep Your Restaurant Staff Motivated

Your teammate is sick on a busy Friday night, every single customer orders the fish option, or there’s a massive van parked across the customer parking slots. It’s impossible to predict everything that can go wrong in our industry. And at times, this constant battle can be demotivating and demoralising. At Tayl, we help hospitality businesses train their staff. So, we know a little bit about how to make your staff happy and ensure they’re focused on your customers. Here are a few of our favourite tips for staff motivation. Motivation Starts at the Beginning First impressions count in a workplace. This means the first day for a staff member shouldn’t be an intense serve-100s-of-customer’s-hot-dishes-at-once type test. It should be organised. This shows your staff you care, respect processes, and are a good business to work for. You can create onboarding checklists, create company handbooks, give out fun facts about your restaurant, or use software to assign everything that needs signed and done on their first few days at work. You’d be surprised how quickly and easily you can create an organised onboarding process and make your first impressions count for the people your business needs to count on. Work is Less Important than Life We can get caught up in our customer’s priorities so much that we forget our own problems. And even though the customer is always right, at the end of the day, you need to remember this is one meal out thousands they’re going to eat. A good way to remind staff of this is to inject a little fun into their shifts. Organise drinks after work, encourage staff to vote on menu options, and pin up step challenges with awards. All of this can help everyone feel more relaxed and more confident while they serve your customers. New Skills No one wants to hear orders eight hours a day, five days a week: no matter how fantastic the pay is. We want goals, space to improve our skills, and to feel a part of a team. You may think this is impossible to give these luxuries to everyone in your workplace. It isn’t, you simply need to get creative. You can assign training and develop learning plans, make room for your team to focus on studying something related to work, or get them included in decisions that can impact their workplace. Career development is hard in our industry, but nonetheless, simply spending a bit of time chatting about personal goals and offering effective training solutions can help motivate your business’s most important staff. Flexible Hours When your staff are off sick and you have employees with different levels of experience, shifts can feel rigid. But this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to get creative with it. Having a slightly more inefficient day twice a month is far better than making an employee unhappy by always refusing to move their shifts. You can also get creative with working hours by training your team for a broad range of skills, such as social media, excel, and accounts. This means they can be rotated onto different hours and still help your business. Sometimes You Just Have to Accept it You now get robots that can serve food. We don’t like this. Going out is all about the interactions, conversations, and smiles. With the joys of people, we also have to also remember their human. Life happens. If their not motivated for a few days, it’s okay. Being frustrated at them for not being motivated can create pressure and push them further from your team. Accept peoples and show understanding and you’ll get more out of your team. Tayl are an affordable online training and compliance platform for hotels, restaurants, and growing businesses.