9 Approaches to Reduce Employee Turnover

When employee turnover is high, there are many costs that come with it. This happens to all staff levels: from junior staff to mangers. It is not easy to eliminate it especially in a restaurant business but there are certain measures that can be used to contain it. Here are 9 approaches to reduce employee turnover.

1. Start by employing smarter

The best staffs have the ability to work, are willing to work and are manageable and teachable. These characteristics cannot be discovered by looking at a resume, you need to upgrade your interviewing skills to be able to understand their attitudes and motivations.

2. Define success to your employees

The work of your employees cannot please you if you do not define success to them. Try to explain to them why you do what they see you do. By explaining to them your actions, they will be able to see if you are good fit for them.

3. Set high performance targets

When high performance becomes a team target, the team members will always expect it from each other and they will support one another in achieving it.

4. Pay a good wage with good benefits

The best way to show you value your employees is by paying them good wages. You will become a hero by just paying a little more. In addition, benefits mean a lot, especially to staffs at the lower end of the pay scale.

5. Treat your employees with respect and dignity

Your employees are not disposable tools; they deserve respect especially from you. You need to understand that your employees are the face of your restaurant and in large measures why customers always return. When you show respect to your employees, they will always want to return to work each day and treat also treat customers with dignity and respect.
6. Show the how grateful you are towards their contributions to the restaurant success

Most employees especially the lower wage employees cannot see their contributions unless you tell them.

7. Ask their ideas and ask for customer feedback

Front-line staffs always hear what customers think about the restaurant, the food and the service. The employees are can advise you on what works and what does not work in the restaurant.

8. Involve the team and improve their skills

There might be no opportunities to move up, however, providing cross training will help the employees improve professionally and also improve their productivity and performance. This will also assist you when you are short staffed.

9. Appreciate a well done job

Always praise and encourage your employees individually. This will improve their confidence and also boost the success of your restaurant.

How to Surprise and Delight Loyal Customers

Rewarding your loyal customers through a Surprise and Delight program can bring more sales and profit into your restaurant. Honoring your faithful customers motivates them and makes them increase their patronage.

Your occasional customers will respond to your Surprise and Delight programs when they receive a substantial reward for coming back more often. These customers will appreciate a unique and valuable gift more than free food and drinks. Through a mobile loyalty program, you can gather adequate information to find out what they like and use it to bring them back to your restaurant. Here are some effective ways to build a successful surprise and delight program.

Status-based Incentives. Some occasional users respond very well to prestige and special treatment that differentiates them from other customers. For instance, the opportunity to “become a Gold member and get an Amuse Bouche every time you come in” is a nice way to do this. In fact, you can take this to the extreme by allowing people to become Platinum members after making a purchase worth $1000. Any one in this category will enjoy special seats and have access to a special collection of wines.

Personal recognition. iBeacon now enables restaurants to recognize and address their customers by their names as soon as they come in. Virtually everyone appreciates this personal touch. Building up such personal relationships makes customers feel very important.

Rewards for Referrals. Reward all the customers that act as ambassadors of your brand by referring new customers to the restaurant. In fact, there are social media apps that track referrals and allow you to know your loyalists. Anytime someone refers another person to you, reward them with a discount on their next purchase. Then they will gladly inform more people about your service.

Use incentives to promote ordering online. It has been discovered that customers spend more when they order goods online. So use double loyalty points to entice your customers to order on the web. It will reduce orders by phone and make your operations easier.

Random selection of winners. A sandwich chain has attracted more patronage by picking customers at random and rewarding them with a free sandwich. The chance of collecting a free gift will make several occasional visitors to return to try their luck.

Offer surprise gifts. Instead of publicizing a reward program, you can add an element of surprise. For instance, you can surprise your customers by giving unexpected special treatment or offering them a special gift. Since they are not expecting it, it helps you to keep things fresh and spontaneous. Thus you please your customers more by surprising them.

Although your goal is to please every customer, what pleases one customer may displease another. Hence, the most effective way of finding out what pleases each customer is through a mobile loyalty program. This will give you detailed feedback from your guests in real time. The details provided can then be used to adapt your promotions to increase patronage from occasional users.

10 Signs You're In A Good Restaurant

Eating out is one of the favorite recreational pursuits for people of all ages. It is both a social occasion and a a way to fulfill the need for top quality food. Finding the good restaurants, especially when there are few options in a geographical region, can be assisted through some of the 10 signs you're in a good restaurant, presented below.

The bathrooms should be clean. You expect the dining areas to be clean, but choosing an otherwise wonderful dining establishment only to find bathrooms that are less than pristine is a disappointment. It makes you wonder whether the restaurant is maintaining the food preparation areas adequately.

Your presence should be recognized promptly. You have a right to be greeted and the process of meeting your food needs should begin without an undue wait. The top eateries seat guests in the area where the server is least busy.

Items on the menu should be in season. If they are not, chances are good that the food is not fresh. It may be shipped in from long distances, frozen, or canned.

Sound levels are important. You want to be able to hear other people at your table. The best restaurants use space and sound engineering to create an acoustically positive space for each table or booth.

Your server should know the menu and be able to explain it to diners. Questions about how food is prepared and ingredients in a complex dish should be knowledgeably answered. The answers can be important for those with allergies or dietary restrictions.

Asking for special accommodations is a troublesome topic. There may be reasons for avoiding certain ingredients, but chefs cannot prepare each dish individually for economic reasons. Restaurants should handle such requests in a consistent and polite manner.

Some diners measure the worth of a restaurant by the bread and butter that is served. Freshly baked warm bread topped by top quality butter is a wonderful way to start the meal. The ability to spread the butter means it is the perfect temperature.

The food should be served for each member of the party at the same time. Waiting for one entree to arrive leads to awkwardness among the guests who have been served. It's hard to eat when someone in the party hasn't yet been served.

Little details can indicate care for the enjoyment of the diner. Sending a small food item home to be enjoyed later is a good touch. Use these 10 signs you're in a good restaurant for your next dining experience.

Increase Your Sales Using A Liquor Inventory Spreadsheet

Hitting the sales targets of your restaurant is not just about being able to serve your customers right but also making sure that you have control and monitoring over the products that you sell including liquor. This is the reason why you need a liquor inventory spreadsheet to assist you in your monitoring activity.

Check out the following benefits of having a liquor inventory spreadsheet.

1. Minimize your restaurant's liquor shrinkage. Shrinkage is a form of loss to the restaurant whereby your liquor inventory diminishes with no definite kind of measurement to determine such loss. Shrinkage happens when your staff will not be able to control what amount of liquor should he give to the customers. Your bartender may pour too much liquor to the customer giving you losses or pour too little amount giving you customer complaints.

Being able to monitor what goes in and what goes out especially when you deal with liquor products is hard to determine. With a liquor inventory spreadsheet, your bartender would be able to specify the exact amount of liquor that should be provided to the customer equivalent to what he paid. This procedure will lessen your restaurant's shrinkage. Eventually, you will notice that your restaurant is earning profit rather than increasing its shrinkage percentage.

2. Prevent liquor spillage and theft. You should be aware that your restaurant operates almost 24 hours. In the middle of an entire shift, your bartender's attention to detail goes down especially when he is sleepy. This causes liquor spillage. When your bartender notice that there is no longer enough wine to offer to the customers, he will get another bottle from the storage without your permission to fill in the gap. You lose so much amount when theft occurs everyday.

With a liquor inventory spreadsheet, all your liquor will counted and monitored accordingly. You will know how many are on the shelf for the day and how many in the storage. In this way your bartenders will refrain from stealing because they know that all the bottles are counted.

3. Increased sales. When you avoid spillage, shrikage and theft percentage to rise or completely eliminate them, you will be able to augment your sales. These are important factors to consider as they form part of your regular expense. Curtailing them on a daily basis will give you higher returns.

You can only curtail these expense items when you acquire a liquor inventory spreadsheet. This monitoring system for your liquor will enable you to manage and take control over your inventory and at the same time avoid unnecessary expense items.

These are some of the benefits that you can get from using a liquor inventory spreadsheet. Once you have set up your system, you can follow these steps:

1. Organize your spreadsheet according to liquor type. Tally in the spreadsheet the exact number of bottles you have.

2. Put another column in your spreadsheet to tally bottles of liquor in use.

3. Sum up the bottle count on each column and counter check with those in the shelf.

4. Update our liquor inventory spreadsheet once a week.

The Importance of Restaurant Liquor Inventory Spreadsheets

Running a restaurant is a costly undertaking.  You need to accurately track your expenditures and profits in order to run your business as efficiently as possible.  One easy way to start is by using a liquor inventory spreadsheet.

One of the easiest places to lose money in your restaurant is the bar due to employee theft and inaccurate record keeping.  A liquor inventory spreadsheet can minimize or completely avoid this problem because it helps you track the cost of each product, the amount being sold, and the profit earned.  If there are any discrepancies at the end of the month, you'll be able to go back and track where the error occurred, and then take the appropriate measures to keep this from happening again.

An inventory spreadsheet is set up with some basic forms of information that you'll need to enter such as the name of the product, and the retail and wholesale price.  If there is other data you'd like to include, you can add that as well. Each time you purchase more product, you'll add this to the spreadsheet as well as anything that has been sold.  An important fact to remember when dealing with spreadsheets is that you must be consistent in keeping it up to date, otherwise it will serve no useful purpose and may even cause more confusion.

Many restaurants are running on a tight enough budget as it is, and the thought of buying expensive inventory software may be out of the question.  There is another option, however, and that is to download a free restaurant liquor inventory spreadsheet.  Dave Lipson from FreeRestaurantForms.com allows you to do this.  You can be assured that downloading this form from Mr. Lipson's site will give you a proper and accurate document that will make your inventory tracking as easy as possible.

Start taking control of your restaurant today by downloading your free liquor inventory form from FreeRestaurantForms.com.  You won't regret it, and may even wish you'd done

A Restaurant Policy Procedure Manual In a Jiffy!

Drawing up a restaurant policy procedure manual is no easy task. You need to be extremely careful while figuring out what to include in your restaurant policy procedure manual. Not just that, if you aren’t attentive and forget to include a point or two, you could get yourself in serious trouble! You might expect something from your employees, but they may not be able to give it to you. Why? Simply because it isn’t included in your restaurant policy procedure manual!

Why You Need It

So why draw up a policy procedure manual in the first place? To be on the right side of the law, that’s why! You need to address legal issues like equal opportunity employment and also address other legal employments. This manual is veritable gold not only in the restaurant business, but pretty much all kinds of business, because it offers protection for both the business and the employees.

What It Entails

As mentioned before, if you outline all the rules and code of conduct of your employees in your restaurant policy procedure manual, they’ll know exactly what you expect from them and it also provides what is known as a basis of consistency in the workplace which is your restaurant.

Moreover, if you have a written policy, it will include your employees’ confidence and also the overall environment at the restaurant. You’re not going to have your waitresses coming up to you in tears, complaining that they’ve been molested by the bartender!

So what should your restaurant policy procedure manual cover?

Responsibilities of every person in every post, working hours, wage and pay periods, discipline, employee benefits, sick leave, vacation and their code of conduct. You should also include guidelines regarding how you will handle substance abuse among employees, sexual or other forms of harassment etc. A grievance policy should not go amiss either.

Are you huffing and puffing after reading all that? Trust me; it’s a far harder job! People even go to lawyers for help with their policy procedure manual! After all, they want to be completely safe and I can’t say I don’t follow their logic! Well, you don’t need to go to a lawyer anytime soon.

With a click of your mouse you can access a free restaurant policy procedure manual at my site and put an end to your woes! Yep, that’s right, it’s absolutely free, so don’t miss it! Get your free restaurant policy procedure manual now!

FREE Restaurant Liquor Inventory Spreadsheet The Easiest Way To Keep Count Of Stock

Running a restaurant is a very time-consuming occupation. There is so much that you have to keep up with, especially when it comes to inventory. The more help you can get with this process, the less stressful it will be. If you are in charge of a restaurant that has a bar in it or serves liquor, keeping the right count of all your inventory can be quite the task. Using a spreadsheet for this type of inventory is a great way to have a visual aid of all that you have in stock or need. Better yet, finding a free restaurant liquor inventory spreadsheet online will save you a lot of the time and effort that is involved with creating one from scratch.

There are many different online sites that provide spreadsheets, but one of the easiest sites to use is freerestaurantforms.com. The liquor inventory spreadsheet offered on this site is very set up very well and lists the most common liquors, wines, wine coolers, beers, draughts, domestic and imported draft beers by name.

A column with the UPCS for each item is positioned right in front of the column with the brand names. Blanks are located in the column to the right of the brand names, in order to provide a place for quantities on hand to be written down. To the right of the column, the price of each type of product is noted. All of this is the main inventory count sheet.

On the next sheet provided is the extension sheet. This is a quick display of all the totals in each section from the front. Since this is a spreadsheet, quantities and prices are added automatically as numbers are punched in.

For instance, when the separate quantities are inserted next to various brands in the wine section, then total costs for each brand are displayed on the inventory page, while a total for the entire wine section is provided on the extension sheet. There's never been a quicker way to tally up a more accurate number of quantities and price totals, than with this free restaurant liquor inventory spreadsheet.