Serving Up Employee Engagement in the Restaurant Business

There’s an enormous buzz in the restaurant industry these days about the future of managing. What can managers do to promote growth and maximize profitability? How can managers motivate employees to give the highest quality in food preparation and customer service? What qualities do restaurant managers need in order to get promoted and remain relevant? The question becomes even more pertinent when placed in the context of a market where consumer spending remains down and the customer service industry has been particularly hard-hit.

While it’s difficult to offer brief summaries to these types of complex questions, one thing is certain: the future of managing isn’t ‘managing’ at all. According to the CEO of General Electric, Jack Welch, “in the future, people who are not coaches will not be promoted. Managers who are coaches will be the norm.” Likewise, in the future of the restaurant business it’ll be companies who reach successful levels of employee engagement who will prosper the most.

How would your professional life change if you were finally able to lead a team of employees who honestly cared about the growth and success of your company? Instead of having to nag, coax, and intimidate indifferent employees into performing their duties, you’d finally take your place as the leader of a team of committed individuals collaborating in their efforts towards the creation of a company culture that inspires innovative thinking and optimizes productivity. This is what can happen when you learn to unlock your business’s full potential through employee engagement.

What is employee engagement?

Employee engagement is an intangible force with tremendously tangible consequences. Engaged employees are:

• Able to perform at the peak of their potentials
• Connected to the company and to its vision
• Motivated to go above and beyond perfunctory performance
• Responsible conce
ing their role in the company
• Passionate about the success of the company and the actions they can take to aid that success

Why does employee engagement matter?

Studies have confirmed that there is a direct link between workforce moral and profitability. MGM Grand, a company with 36 restaurants and bars, found this out firsthand when a recent program to engender employee engagement resulted in a 68% increased operating profit over a five year span. Likewise, the June 2008 edition of CFO magazine reported that Best Buy recently experienced a 100,000 increase in net operating income for every 10th of a point increase in employee engagement.

Yet it is estimated that in an average company:

• 29% of employees are engaged
• 14% just don’t care
• 57% can become engaged with proper motivatio

This 57% makes up the majority of your workforce. They are a vast unused resource just waiting to be tapped. The failure to tap into that resource has grave consequences: employee disengagement costs an estimated $240-270 billion dollars every year. But employees who are actively engaged perform 20 percent higher and the likelihood of them remaining with the company is 87 percent higher. So what can restaurant managers do in order to foster employee engagement and optimize profits and productivity?

Opening doors to employee engagement

Believe it or not, employee engagement isn’t something that managers have to create from scratch. Most employees want to feel proud of their work place and of their contribution to the company. Successful managers will learn to nurture those urges by coaching their employees instead of managing them. A successful coach is someone who inspires an individual or a team towards continuous improvement and performance through influential leadership. Five employee engagement drivers that restaurant managers can practice are:

• Know them: find out who your employees are and what motivates them
• Grow Them: coach them in continuous learning and development
• Inspire Them: build a sense of pride in the company and in their contribution
• Involve Them: encourage a synergistic workplace through collaboration
• Reward Them: create recognition programs and perform acts of appreciatio

Restaurant managers have already had great success creating practical procedures such as forums for up and down communication in order to foster employee engagement. Employees gain empowerment through sharing ideas and feedback with each other and with managers. Stephen R. Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, points out that it is this sort of synergistic process that leads to the discovery of “new solutions to old problems.”

When given the opportunity by managers who lead as coaches, many employees will rush to show initiative and contribution their ideas and effort. It is pride in this kind of contribution that gives employees a shared stake in the success of the company that goes beyond their next paycheck.

An employee who is engaged will do more than tell a table that salmon is the fish of the day. The engaged employee will explain how the King Salmon arrived from Seattle, how the sides of vegetables were purchased locally, and how the meal will be cooked to perfection. So while the actual value of employee engagement may be incalculable, there can be no doubt that it is priceless.