Food service management; a lost art?In the hospitality industry, happy employees make for happy guests, and, happy guests make for a full hotel and a hotel restaurant with a waiting list: it’s that simple. Not anymore! As more hoteliers start to demand self-sufficiency and enhanced profitability from their Food and Beverage outlets, employee happiness sometimes ceases to be a consideration, especially as Food & Beverage managers fight to revive lagging bottom lines. At times like this, staff moral plummets, turnover skyrockets, and before you know it, the staff, i.e. the better of the lot, is moving out of the door, taking some of the guests with them. Pretty soon, more of the guests are moving out because the competition is taking better care of them.
The problem with hotel Food and Beverage operations is that it is run by hotel Food and Beverage people. The restaurant business is just not about serving food or achieving the budgeted average check, it’s about making people feel good. In most parts of the world, guest standards and expectations have been set by people who run free standing restaurants of exceptionally high standards. Their reputations have been built, not merely on the bedrock of quality food but also on delivering service that ‘restores’. Remember, the word ‘Restaurant’ comes from the French verb ‘restauer – meaning ‘to restore’: you were supposed to feel better leaving than you did going in! Hotel F & B managers need to be acutely aware of this and operate accordingly. So, what causes this lack of care towards providing guest service? On the one hand, you could complain that ‘the guests are getting more and more difficult’ or ‘you just can’t find enough good employees anymore’. Or on the other hand, you could take a closer look at your current recruitment and training efforts. Many organisations expect staff to meet standards of service without having any established, if they do have any, it is vague or no one has seen it.
Recruitment is mostly of the emergency type, if you are breathing and conscious, can speak a smattering of English and ever worked at McDonalds, you are hired. Oh and by the way can you start tomorrow? Training is ‘on-the-go’ and is left to supervisors, (if they had the time, inclination and knowledge). In the few cases where there is training of staff by subject matter experts (SME’s), it is mostly confined to teaching the mechanics of providing service activity, which invariably leads to robotic service styles. Hardly anyone educates frontline staff (Top to bottom) understand, that delivery of hospitality requires (at the very least), treating others - and this includes both guests and employees, with ‘warmth and generosity’.
Small wonder then that staff turnover is high. Organisations are forced into more emergency recruitment and more skill-averse inductions. Some, in order to pre-empt the inevitable, carry luxury level staff numbers, and yet service orbits around 2-star levels. It all boils down to investing in your people. Regular training, good communication, listening, patience, treating employees well – they all contribute towards the successful operating philosophy: To delight and satisfy all guests. The bottom-line of Restaurant management is to remember that people cannot be managed; only activities can be managed. The best a manager can do is to get everyone moving in the right direction.
Hospitality Sri Lanka
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