While your recipes are delicious, your restaurant is just not producing enough. Whether it’s your kitchen constantly being behind or customer churn due to wait times, you need a restaurant that can quickly turn tables and still ensure a great guest experience.
You may think that it’s not that hard to do, but every restaurant owner and manager worries about productivity, especially during peak hours. Even with things like better POS efficiency, you could still experience wait times due to a seasonal rush or busy weekend night.
So what can you do to improve productivity overall and for these specific rush moments? This quick guide breaks it down.
Take Time to Observe Your Restaurant Flow
Where do you see friction? What’s happening in your kitchen when orders come in? What’s happening with your wait staff when customers arrive? How “on it” are your employees? You need to pinpoint areas where your productivity is slower so that you can find what is the root cause for breakdowns in communication or workflow.
Pick the Right Staff for the Right Rush
Restaurant management is responsible for finding great talent who are naturally gifted with charm and charisma around customers. These are your bread winners, and they make productivity seem easy to achieve. However, if you have slower employees who are new or just simply not being as productive as you like during a rush, then you have to find better employees who can handle pressure with ease and help your restaurant be more successful.
Did you know POS efficiency can help with this? You can use a POS to track efficiency and performance from employees, then you can get a report to see who should work the next rush based on their data.
Manage Your Inventory Better
It’s every kitchen’s worst nightmare. You’ve got orders flying in for all directions for the steak special, but you’re all out of steak. What happened? You should automate this process so that whenever your inventory gets low, your POS can automatically order more or even predict when you’ll run out of inventory. You could already have had a new steak order in and delivered by the time your rush happens.
Faster Checkout Options
If you are having issue with table turnover, then you need a faster POS. There are so many options today for mobile and tabletop checkout that customers never have to wait to order or get the check anymore. You can also provide other checkout options, such as ways to split payment or leave a tip.
Delegate Tasks to Your Best Employees
The Eisenhower box strategy is a typical way to get this done. On a piece of paper, you can draw four boxes. The top left box is for all “urgent and important to-dos” that only you or a manager can get through. In the top right box, list all of your not urgent but important to-do items. On the bottom left, list tasks that are not necessarily important for you to do. This is your delegate box. In the last box or your bottom right, list all of the not important, not urgent tasks. You can decide if you want to delete these.
