Using systems to tackle common challenges for restaurant businesses

There are many unique challenges you will face as a business owner of a chain of restaurants and not all of those challenges are going to be easy to overcome. Some of the most common challenges we hear about are:

• trouble maintaining consistency and compliance;
• staff aren’t engaged or satisfied in their job; and
• Hiring and retaining staff is difficult

However (and thankfully) systemising your business can make the majority of those challenges far easier to handle. Read on for our top tips on how systems can help your restaurant business achieve operational excellence every day.

‍

Start implementing self-audits

As a franchisor or an owner of a multisite restaurant business, ensuring that each location is consistent and compliant is of paramount importance. Unfortunately (and particularly in Covid times), it’s not always possible to get physically out to each and every site. Self-audits are a great way to ensure meticulous consistency and that your restaurants are compliant with all standards. Some of you may be absolutely terrified of handing over the responsibility of auditing to site managers or franchisees, but with Ideagen Op Central’s auditing tools, you can be confident that all self-audits are completely accurate and that all your restaurants are keeping it consistent and compliant. 

Conduct regular staff surveys

Your employees are the face of your company, so if your team isn't happy, the business can seriously suffer. Happy employees give better customer service, they are more productive and are more focused and effective in their jobs. Which gives your business the awesome benefits of reduced turnover costs, increased productivity and happier customers. Particularly in recent times, employee satisfaction has taken quite the hit. With restrictions on density limits, mask requirements, vaccination requirements, etc. your customer facing team have had to deal with some difficult situations and most have probably had to deal with quite aggressive customers too. While in most Australian states there are now very little restrictions in place, It’s more than understandable that your team may not be quite as happy in their work as they once were. The leadership team needs to come up with ways to improve employee satisfaction and the best place to start is through staff surveys (which can easily be conducted through Ideagen Op Central). Your team can anonymously share how they are feeling in their role and with the company and also share ways in which the company can support them. The responses that you get can give you really valuable insights into your company in areas you can't normally see. Not only this, but the simple act of sending out regular surveys to your team can indicate to them that the company cares about them, which in itself can go a long way into improving employee satisfaction. 

Provide engaging and continuous training

We know how often things change in the hospitality industry, so keeping your training and instructional content up-to-date (and running continuously) is extremely important. Not only this, but providing your team with relevant, continuous training is a great way to keep those engagement levels high. Start creating beautiful, engaging and highly relevant instructional content with a purpose-built learning management system (or LMS). A great LMS is going to give you the ability to create personalised training programs comprised of many different activity types, such as: 

• Quizzes
• Workshops
• Policy sign-offs
• Remote assessments
• Observations

With highly engaging content that is actually relevant and customised to the learner, your team will be happy to learn and undergo further training. 

Streamline the hiring and onboarding process

Hospitality in particular have faced a number of hiring and retention challenges recently such as:

• high turnover;
• job insecurity (largely due to lockdowns); and
• a lack of skilled migrants

These challenges have been causing major headaches for businesses, but by systemising their hiring and onboarding processes, those headaches can be greatly reduced. You will likely have a number of different avenues for hiring which can make things quite confusing, but Ideagen Op Central makes this process far easier. Ideagen Op Central’s recruiting tools give you the ability to design your own job board, post new jobs, manage candidates and issue employment contracts. But it’s not just about the hiring process, in fact, the onboarding process may be the most important part. A poor onboarding experience can create highly disengaged employees who do not fully understand the requirements of their role. To avoid this, build a highly engaging and personalised onboarding experience in Ideagen Op Central. Our system's unique onboarding tools give you the ability to provide a special onboarding experience to every employee every single time, leaving them more engaged and better equipped to perform at their best.