How to Manage Restaurant Employees Like a Pro and Meet Sales Goals!

Aug 22, 2021
In addition to having great menu items that match your target groups and having great restaurant concept At the heart of running a restaurant business, , another important thing that many restaurant owners struggle with is employees, which form an important component that restaurant businesses cannot do without.

 We believe many of you restaurant owners have probably run into problems with employees in one way or another, whether in terms of arriving late for work, work absenteeism, arriving drunk for work, asking for advance payments, dressing improperly, speaking impolitely with customers, cooking food without following recipes properly, not smiling, engaging in fights, etc. All of these problems negatively impact business and reflect the restaurant’s ineffective employee management, which makes it difficult for the business to grow because more business growth and branch expansions will only lead to more employee problems.

Therefore, setting up a proper work team management system is one of the top priorities of restaurant owners, and we have some guidelines for you on how to set up such a system to fully bring out the work potential of employees and create extraordinary results for the organization. Read on to find out what these guidelines are.


  1. How to Set Restaurant Regulations
Whenever large groups of people stay together, rules and regulations become very important because they help minimize problems and create a framework for happy coexistence. With that said, some important rules and regulations that you need to have should include the following: 

– Restaurant benefits and how to obtain them

– Work, break and payment schedules

– Penalties for whenever an employee does something wrong

– The restaurant’s hierarchy of penalties

– Leave privileges and descriptions

– Conditions for taking leave in line with regulations

These are basically regulations set by labor laws.


2. Job Description
Job description essentially specifies the characteristics of the different work positions of the restaurant as well as the people who might be needed to fill those positions such as in regards to education and age range. Job descriptions also specify what each employee in each work position has to do, and they provide you with information for screening applicants for each position based on your requirements.

3. Salary Levels and Disastrous Problems for Restaurants That Lack Them
Take, for example, an employee who is hired later and doesn’t know how to do work, but is paid a lot more than people who have been there for over two years. Whenever employees talk about salaries and learn about their respective salaries, resentment might follow, and older employees with lower salaries might work less effectively and eventually quit. 

So, you should state clearly what the minimum and maximum salaries for each work position is as well as the conditions explaining how and why the salaries for different work positions are different.




4. Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs)
If you want your employees to work according to a standard, what your restaurant needs to have before it is opened are standard operating procedures or SOPs. This is because they let employees know what the restaurant wants them to do in each work position.




5. Training
If you have standard operating procedures but don’t teach your employees, you won’t gain a lot of benefits. Therefore, you have to train every single one of your employees on a regular basis, and in providing training the trainers need to use a 4-step training technique composed of the following:

  1. Prepare: Prepare the learning content, facilities, equipment, date, time and number of employees for training.
  2. Present: On the date of the training, the trainer has to explain the importance of the things that he or she will be teaching the employees and then provide them with a slow demonstration.
  3. Tryout: Give employees the opportunity to tryout the things they learned with the supervision and guidance of trainers.
  4. Follow-up: After training, it is necessary to monitor employee performance continuously for at least 7 days to determine whether or not employees practice what they’ve learned.



6. Admiration/Encouragement

Here is one thing restaurant owners can do for free. It’s something important employees want aside from money. It is the sincere praise of restaurant owners whenever employees do well, or it’s the encouragement employees receive when they’re tired from work or struggling with problems at home. That’s because the workplace is like a second home to employees, and they might even spend more time at work than at home. And this is why you should never forget this tiny little detail.


Attitude also has a huge influence on employee management effectiveness. How do you view your employees? If you only see them as employees, you will only get employees who work and perform their duties every day and little else. However, if you view them as valuable assets of your organization and you invest in their management, these assets will produce work effectiveness that produces worthwhile value for the organization.

New entrepreneurs or restaurant owners looking to learn more about how to manage people in the restaurant business can take this free online course It has 7 interesting lessons as follows:

Chapter 1: Managing People is Like Managing a Business  

Chapter 2: How Many Employees Should Your Restaurant Have? 

Chapter 3: Where Do You Find People? How Do You Choose People? 

Chapter 4: Aside from Their Salaries, What Else Do Employees Want?

Chapter 5: What’s the Difference between a Service Charge and Incentive? 

Chapter 6: Deducting from Employee Pay for Errors Is a Mistake 

Chapter 7: Equal Treatment of Employees

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