2012 restaurant resolutions Back oF House:
share profits. As you already know, the name of the game in your kitchen is efficiency. The ideal kitchen doesn’t waste any food, uses minimal en- ergy to prepare meals, and get the correct order to the customer in a timely fashion.
In reality, that’s an impossible ideal to reach. your kitchen staff is paid an hourly wage and they’re go- ing to be paid that hourly wage whether they ruin an entire stock pot of the soup special or not. often their primary incentive isn’t the wage itself, which is probably nothing special, but the fear of losing their job. fear is a terrible incentive when it comes to encouraging maximum productivity and efficiency.
An excellent incentive to promote productivity and efficiency is profit sharing. Kitchen staff accumulate shares depending on how long they’ve worked for your restaurant. every quarter, a portion of the profits is divvied up among the kitchen staff depending on the number of shares they’ve accumulated.
right now you must be thinking: “first you want me to send my payroll costs through the roof with salaried servers and then you want me to share profits with my dishwashers?”
Imagine the same scenario we went through above: an employee accidentally ruins an entire stock pot of the daily soup special. All the employees in your kitchen are paid by the hour. They shrug their shoulders and start making an- other batch, which costs you time (paying staff to do the same work twice), re- sources (all those ingredients will have to be reordered sooner), and efficiency (the gas/electricity needed to prepare the soup all over again and the lost work the staff doing the work over again could have spent doing something else).
In a profit-sharing kitchen, the sous chef who’s been working in this kitchen for 10 years and makes a couple grand every time the profit sharing checks go out takes it upon himself to show the kid who makes the soup how to do it right the first time. It’s in his interest to cut food costs whenever possible. line cooks turn off half the range during slow periods to save on utilities and everybody uses portion scales to make sure there’s no waste.
you’ll probably find that even after you pay out the kitchen staff, your profits still rise because of all the savings a truly efficient, well-trained kitchen produces. And your turnover rate will plummet, saving you training time and quality control issues with inexperienced staff. Who doesn’t want a job that pays out a bonus check 3 or 4 times a year?
resolution aspiring
some resolutions are based more in aspiration than reality, and chances are a complete revamp of your payroll system fits into the “aspiring” resolution catego- ry. however, 2012 is certainly not too late to start thinking about the ways you can incentivize staff to perform more efficiently and ef- fectively while minimizing turnover at the same time. you may never share profits with your kitchen or salary your servers, but some sort of creative compensation strat- egy will make an impact on your restaurant’s performance over the long term.
Tundra Specialties 888.594.4183 59
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60