Measuring Restaurant Staff Performance: 6 Ways to Monitor the KPI of Your Restaurant Staff

Entire restaurant staff smiling for a kitchen snapshot

There is no denying of the fact that your restaurant staff is the lifeline of your restaurant. Your job isn’t over by only hiring the best restaurant employees. You must train them and measure their performance as well. Diligenty tracking the restaurant staff performance will also enable yolu to understand if there are any loopholes in the system that is affecting your staff performance, which in turn is having a regressive impact on your sales. For this, you need to look at the Key Performance Indicator (KPI) of your restaurant staff.

There are various ways by which you can monitor their performance and measure the restaurant staff KPI; this will further enhance the overall restaurant management structure. From keeping track of the number of tables covered, the sales extracted from the stands, discounts given, and definitely by tracking the attendance of the employees. And you can do all of this and more by only using restaurant management software. 

How To Monitor Restaurant Staff Performance

Having a proper restaurant management software in place will ease out your restaurant operations immensely. Not only will it help you to track your sales, inventory, and measure your restaurant’s performance, it can also help you to measure the performance of each of your restaurant staff.

By maximizing the use of your POS, you can simplify the process of managing your restaurant, while keeping track of the new opportunities to cut down on outgoing costs, and how you can upgrade staff performance. The practical ways by which you can track your restaurant staff performance through restaurant management software are:

1. Checking The Number of Tables Covered

There are various restaurant management software available in the market, and many of those come with the feature that helps you track the number of tables covers by each restaurant staff on a specific day or at a period.

This will help you view your restaurant staff’s performance. If you happen to understand after analyzing the reports that despite the high footfall, a particular team hasn’t covered as many tables as expected, you will know that there is some issue.

The poor performance can either be due to their slow attitude or because of the longer table turnover time, which mostly happens when it takes longer than usual for the food to get out of the kitchen. No matter what the issue is, from the reports of the number of tables covered by your restaurant staff, you can try and find the causes of the problem.

2. Monitoring The Item Worth Sold

Once you have the number of tables covered by the restaurant staff, you can calculate the bills generated at those tables. This will help you to understand the total sales made by each restaurant staff. Hence, if you see that an employee is not bringing in that much of business, try and train them on how they can accelerate the process. However, if you know that he is consistently not living up to your expectations, then you must reconsider having him on board.

Restaurant Staff Hiring - Best Practices to Putting Together a Great Team

3. Tracking the Discounts Offered

If you have a robust restaurant management system installed at your restaurant, then you will be able to receive real-time reports of all the discounts offered at your restaurant and by your restaurant staff. This will help you to analyze if any of your employees are offering an unreasonable number or amounts of discounts, which might be detrimental for your restaurant. If by chance, you happen to come across such happenings at your restaurant, then you can very effectively get to the source and try and resolve the issue.

4. Tracking the Responsibilities

Keeping track of whether all your employees are diligently performing their daily chores, is imperative and hence, you should take help for the various list-making apps that will help you to have a vigilant eye. You might even think about encouraging your employees to use them. Apps like Trello are a great way to build task lists. Such an app allows several of your team members to weigh in and update critical tasks on your list.

5. Monitoring their Attendance

Keeping track of your restaurant staff attendance is extremely important and is a crucial restaurant staff KPI. Restaurant management software generally helps you to track their presence. While you should consider genuine reasons for taking an off, if you happen to see that some of your employees are consistently taking an off every other day or coming and leaving after or before their scheduled time, then you can consider having a word with them. Since, after scheduling the employees, if an employee doesn’t appear or comes in late, it might put higher pressure on your other staff, this will affect their performance.

6. Monitoring Customer Feedback

If you want to convert your customers into ‘regulars’, you will need a team of efficient staff who can serve them well. This makes it imperative to track key metrics, such as customer retention rate (CRR) and online customer review scores and feedback. You can gauge how good your employee’s service quality is based on how high your retention rate is – repeat customers mean high performance. You may also keep track of the number of complaints received on an average. Check, 

  • If the chef takes longer than usual? or, 
  • Are the servers not quick enough?

You can also acquire customer feedback through surveys, Google analytics, social media comments, and Yelp scores. You should actively track these reviews in order to identify all the touchpoints in the customer journey where guests have appreciated your staff’s service or have complained about their behavior. Identify patterns in negative reviews and determine if these issues can be fixed by streamlining the training processes further. 

Tips collected are another measure that lets you know if the customer experience has been positive. The more satisfied a customer is, the higher tips are given, which by association translates to good employee performance. Positive feedback from guests goes a long way in determining if your staff is trained enough to provide a great overall dining experience. 

Optimum restaurant staff performance has the potential of driving a restaurant towards success. If all your restaurant staff starts performing their daily task diligently, then you can be sure that your customers will be happy. Such instances will help you to retain customers and augment your overall sales. Try out these tips to monitor your restaurant staff performance, and see how the entire productivity rises!

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Daniel McCarthy is a seasoned restaurant consultant and serves as the Communication Manager at Restroworks, a prominent F&B SaaS company. Drawing from his vast knowledge of leveraging innovative technological solutions, Daniel excels at enhancing restaurant operations and revenue, thereby contributing to the ongoing transformation of the industry.

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