by Alastair Scott | Oct 14, 2024 | Thought Leadership
I always believed it took just four weeks to change a habit, but it turns out I was wrong. A few weeks ago, we had a training session in our office on the “lies we tell ourselves”, otherwise known as personal bias, led by the brilliant Dulcie Swanston. She pointed out that, on average, it actually takes 66 days to solidify a habit. She also made the intriguing observation that the more intelligent you are, the stronger your personal bias tends to be—which makes it hard to argue! So, we’re either unintelligent and unbiased, or smart and biased. What a choice!
Habits are arguably the most important factor in hospitality. Our routines form the backbone of everything we do. When these habits are well-formed, new team members adopt them effortlessly, almost without thinking. It’s a great place to be when your habits are strong, but a terrible situation when they aren’t.
To change a habit, it takes around 10 weeks—and even longer for part-time staff. This requires significant effort, but it’s necessary. The key lesson from the 66-day rule is that trying to implement too many changes at once often leads to failure. Instead, we need to slow down, focus on fewer changes, and make sure they stick.
I also follow the rule of three. Make three changes, implement them fully, and then move on to the next set of three. By dividing the year into terms, you have three chances to implement three new habits each term, resulting in nine new habits a year.
Nine new habits will make a massive difference. If I were to pick nine for the industry based on my experience, I would pick:
1 – Smiling: The first article I ever wrote was about the power of a smile, and it still holds the top spot for our teams. A genuine smile creates an immediate connection with guests, sets the tone for positive interactions, and reinforces the warm, welcoming atmosphere we strive for in hospitality.
2 – Hellos and Goodbyes: There’s nothing worse than being ignored when you arrive or leave. A warm, enthusiastic greeting sets a positive tone for the guest’s experience from the start, while a cheerful goodbye leaves a lasting impression.
3 – “OK”: I can’t stand this word. We don’t aim to deliver an “OK” experience; we want to offer a great one. So why do we ask guests if “everything is OK”? It’s lazy and disengaged, like a quick pass-by. Instead, we should be more thoughtful—ask if they’re enjoying their meal or if they’d like another glass of wine. That’s real service.
4 – Full out, full in: The number of team members I see drop off something and then pass by lots of empty plates, glasses and customers on the way back is immeasurable. Think of the efficiency if we got it right.
5 – Fact Finding: We all remember those wonderful experiences where someone showed genuine interest in us. Simple questions like, “are you celebrating something special?” or “how far have you travelled?” can spark connections. I don’t care what the questions are; just ask something!
6 – Ask them before they have to ask you: When a drink is empty, or nearly empty, it is pretty obvious. Time to make the suggested sell. Can I get you another? Obviously, “are you OK for drinks?” is banned!
7 – 4-foot rule: This is a rule Walmart certainly used to have. If you are within 4 feet, say hello and smile, even if you are on your way elsewhere. The guest will understand and will be grateful for the contact.
8 – Eye contact: In the modern world, eye contact is even more essential. It creates a connection that makes such a difference. I once asked the bar team to tell each other the colour of the customer’s eyes.
9 – Restaurant eyes: This is perhaps the hardest, but there is nothing worse than trying to get someone’s attention and they never look at you. Scanning your section is a part of the job.
If we could make these nine service habits stick, imagine how much better, and busier we would be!
by Alastair Scott | Sep 30, 2024 | Thought Leadership
One of the most frequent questions I get asked is, if you are an ops manager, how do you organise yourself to deliver on labour in the most effective way, and in the least amount of time? The flippant answer is that it depends on a number of factors like the manager, the objective and on the ops manager themselves. But answering the question in this way is not entirely useful, so I am going to try and set out a few guidelines that will help to deliver this.
1 – Setting objectives for teams is essential, but they must be clearly defined so that progress can be measured weekly. In the past, this was often tied to labour percentage targets. Today, it is more likely to involve aligning with deployment goals that meet corporate objectives—or even hitting specific cash targets. Surprisingly, many large businesses still prefer managing at the cash level, despite having advanced deployment systems. While assigning objectives is common practice, the real challenge lies in achieving them!
2 – Establishing templates for business thresholds is more effective than relying on weekly signoffs. While you might expect weekly signoffs to be necessary, they demand excessive effort to make work and encourage sites to see if they can get away with it. This either results in a time-consuming overhaul or a repetitive process that drains resources. Managing fifteen sites could easily turn into a full day’s work. Instead, I recommend agreeing on templates for sales thresholds. Well-designed templates streamline the process and can be quickly adjusted, saving time.
3 – Schedule a weekly visit to adjust, refine, and discuss operations. This may seem like a big commitment, but it ensures each site has a deep conversation about labour roughly four times a year—a small investment given its impact on cost, service, and sales. The challenge comes if this process slips. Without regular review, template rotas become outdated, get ignored, and new, unapproved rotas will surface. If you are not careful, you will end up reverting to the process of weekly sign-off, which is time-consuming and destructive.
4– What does an effective process look like? It involves several stages, varying in length based on time and the quality of the team. Nailing these stages and embedding them into your business as best practice will really make a difference to how you deliver on labour.
Stage 1 – Tasks: First, identify all tasks within the business, categorise them, and determine whether they are fixed or slack. It is crucial to coach new assistant managers and managers on this properly, so that slack tasks do not become fixed, and fixed tasks do not get moved to pre or post opening times.
Stage 2 – Management Rota: Creating a solid management rota is key to ensuring proper leadership without overstaffing on slower days. By carefully structuring the rota, you can maintain a balanced and efficient operation.
Stage 3 – Deployment: Matching supply and demand is essential. A rota must be designed to align with these needs while delivering excellent service throughout the week. Keeping in mind that the worst service often occurs when you are the most overstaffed. The key is finding the right balance to ensure efficiency without sacrificing service quality.
Stage 4 – Shift Planning and Leadership: This is the most crucial step. By agreeing a shift plan, you focus on the essential tasks and the necessary structures to ensure the leadership team is actively managing the business. It is about organising operations to be guest-focused and effective. This level of detail is vital for maintaining a well-run, efficient operation, both on busy days and during slower times.
Stage 5 – Kitchens: Kitchens have always been the major source of overspend in our industry. Too often, we have sacrificed front-of-house teams to add more staff in the kitchen. Kitchens alone, with their challenges of line structuring, prep, and pot washing, require immense attention. In fact, effectively managing a kitchen could easily take a full day or more. But the rewards for getting it right – both in terms of cost control and operational efficiency – are substantial.
Maintaining these steps may seem challenging, but they are a crucial part of running a successful business in today’s high-labour-cost environment. By implementing these guidelines, you can create a more efficient operation that not only controls labour costs but also delivers great service across the board. It is all about putting the right systems in place to get your teams and your business set up for success.
by Alastair Scott | Sep 13, 2024 | Thought Leadership
For many of us who benefit from increased trade through the summer months, the beginning of September is a tough time. The kids go back to school, the summer holidays are over, and trade takes a dip.
I have been reading all the company results that say turnover has held up, but profits over the last year have not. I am reminded that the run from September to Christmas is a key trading period, and it also amounts to nearly one-third of the year. Like January, September is a pivotal trading period and is the time to make sure the key business targets are set to achieve the level of profitability we require.
Food and drink GP, and what we call ops costs, all need to be well-managed through this period. As of course, does labour, which I am going to talk a bit more about. My first piece of advice is to spend a decent amount of time getting a good base rota for this time of year, with a cost against it that meets the needs of the business.
For us, 10 of the 12 weeks were all within a 15% range, so if we pick the lowest number in that range, we can set a rota that works for each week. This means we can work hard on creating the perfect rota, which focuses on the following areas:
1 – Minimum staffing levels
It is too easy to decide that you need three people front of house, when two will work better. The same applies in the kitchen. Setting minimum staffing levels for quiet days or quiet times of busier days is one of the most important activities.
2 – Manager hours
It is critical that we move away from someone having an admin day. It is much better if we have admin afternoons, where the manager can work lunch, do admin in the afternoon, and then step back to the floor for the early evening until the end of the shift.
3 – Slack tasks
We need to determine which tasks can be done within normal working hours and do not need specific hours against them. Kitchen prep is the toughest one, but it is also important to focus on how the staff can do all the closing tasks before the customers leave, saving valuable hours after the business closes.
4 – Staffing for peaks
While we might want to focus on costs, it is still essential to ensure we have enough staff on when we are busy. Cutting staff at the wrong times just damages service levels, and thus in the end, sales, which is counterproductive. I am a massive believer that we all need to make sure the peaks of the weeks are well-staffed, as this is fundamental to growing our business.
If we do all these things we can create an amazing service led by a cost-effective rota. As I have written elsewhere, overstaffing is the enemy of good service, and we all need to ensure we do not creep into overstaffing as sales drop in September. But the great thing about this process is that you can agree a rota, and a cost, with the relevant people for a whole series of weeks, and it should be easy to manage. But what are the management risks?
1 – Ground up rotas
It still surprises me how often people write rotas from a blank sheet of paper rather than using a well-thought-through template. A template rota delivers a lower cost, better service, and takes less time to write. The only adjustments then need to be for any events or unusual trading patterns.
2 – Managing the costs before the week starts
It is essential that as management teams, we stay on top of this during this period and catch anything early and well before the week starts. The perennial problem with labour is drift, with teams tending to want more to drift back to the old, easier, ways. Pressure from teams as to when they want to work is normally the biggest factor, and we need to stay strong and help embed new habits.
3 – Adding one on
Many managers can look at the rota for the day they are running and think they are short, either through a misguided belief that service will be better or because they want an easier shift. We must train these people not to do it and really look at how the costs move in the week.
Making our business processes work in the long periods of average sales and engineering our businesses to deliver the desired level of profitability at these stages is the way we will improve our profitability as an industry. In the long run, we need an appropriate level of profit to pay down debt, re-invest, and to grow.
by Alastair Scott | Sep 6, 2024 | Thought Leadership
I’ve been thinking about the word ‘coping’ recently. It is a word I dislike because it is used far too often, without thinking about its actual implications. Whenever I have watched service in my own restaurants at times when we’ve been short staffed, I always hear ‘we coped’.
What the team mean when they say this is: we didn’t have any serious complaints; none of the staff walked out; we didn’t get asked to take money off bills. We survived a struggle.
So, if we’re only ever coping, we’re lowering the standard of our businesses. Everyone knows that as industry we have, and continue to, overcome cost pressures and labour shortages, amongst other struggles. And yes, perhaps just getting by means we are faring better than others. But, when staff say, ‘we coped’, what they are really saying is: guests were ignored at times; bills went down too late; service was very slow; our starter and dessert penetration dropped; we didn’t offer second drinks; we stopped looking at the guest in case they wanted something; tips dropped but not too badly; the customer might think twice about coming back next time. Our staff didn’t feel great about their shift, and didn’t feel that, as a company, we care about service or how their shift goes, because otherwise, we would have put more staff on. So yes, maybe they did ‘cope’, but without customers or staff, you won’t be in business much longer.
What we should be doing is solving the problem. We all love giving guests a brilliant time and feel great when they leave with a smile and a compliment. So why don’t we make the changes that can ensure all of this happens? Which of course, means rotaing the right number of staff at the right times, ensuring service standards are never compromised, and then identify areas improvement and strategies to improve productivity, whether that be through the help of consultants, or within the team.
There are many questions we could ask as to why we aren’t matching deployment levels to demand. Is it because staff don’t want to work then? Is it because we have run out of budget? Is it because we have got into the habit of only putting a certain number of people on because we believe that coping is good enough? Is it because we just haven’t got the part-time staff? Is it because we have allocated staff at a different time of the week? All of these questions require us to look into our labour habits and then find a way to manage them across the business so that we can be our best in every shift.
I wouldn’t have written this article if I didn’t think that the word coping has created a lens through which we excuse ourselves for poor service. As the owner of a labour tool which constantly highlights the need for more staff when we are busy, I am constantly surprised by the number of sessions which are planned to be short-staffed.
I am reminded of when I used to be involved in the Trout in Oxford, the beautiful pub on the river made famous by Inspector Morse. Whenever there was a sunny day people flocked to the pub, only to be disappointed by the service and then not to return until the next sunny day. If you are not careful you end up in the very vicious circle of being busier in the quieter sessions, because your reputation during peak trading times is not quite good enough.
So, the next time you hear the word cope, please do explore it a bit more.
by Alastair Scott | Aug 27, 2024 | Thought Leadership
A few rather dangerous things seem to be coming together at the moment. Not long ago, I wrote about the challenges faced by the younger generation. As a result of Covid, educational attainment has fallen behind across the world, and social skills have also taken a hit. Prolonged isolation and disruption of normal routines have left many struggling to catch up, both academically and socially. These setbacks are becoming a serious issue for the future of this generation and their employment prospects.
Actually, England has held its ground and is even moving up in global rankings, though this is largely because it hasn’t worsened. The Scottish, on the other hand, because of “progressive” child-centric policies have sadly fallen down the world rankings. As a result, the generation that went through school during the pandemic (perhaps there will be a name for them, but for now, I will call them the Covid generation) faces disadvantages in the workplace in terms of both social skills and educational attainment.
The new Labour government is planning to make significant changes to wage and employment policies. They intend to remove the lower levels of the minimum wage, which would bring younger people up to the same rate as those in higher age brackets. Young workers could earn the same as their older counterparts, regardless of age. They also aim to improve immediate employment rights by giving new workers the same protections and entitlements as those who have been employed for longer and have already proven their worth in the job.
Both activities clearly have a significant cost on our industry. Another increase in the minimum wage will inevitably add a substantial financial burden. This will undoubtedly affect our bottom line. Additionally, the plan to bring forward employment rights will make it increasingly difficult to manage underperforming employees. It will not only make it harder to let go of those who are not meeting expectations but will also drive up our HR costs.
However, I am not sure that any financial argument will have much of an impact on a government that is so firmly focused on its mission. Perhaps, then, our worries and arguments will end up seeming parochial and irrelevant in the grander scheme of things. The government’s determination to push through its agenda may well overshadow any industry-specific concerns, no matter how valid or pressing they may seem to us.
What I do think will matter, though, is youth unemployment. We are currently at a time when youth unemployment has been rising again. Over the last 12 months, it has increased from 11.4% to 13.9%, according to the Office of National Statistics. Additionally, the economic inactivity rate for young people has also been climbing, going from 38.8% to 41%. These statistics are the most concerning for our country, as it seems to me that the greatest risk to society is when young people fail to develop a work ethic in this crucial phase of life, whether after school or university. This, in my view, is the real measure of a government’s success—not just whether people are paid enough when they work or how many rights they have.
As an industry, we should be campaigning hard for young people because we are one of the key recruiters and one of the main developers of skills for 16- to 24-year-olds. As I sit here on a beach holiday, surrounded by Irish staff, I am reminded that the option for European summer employment has also largely disappeared. We need to make a strong case for our industry’s role in helping the Covid generation become an asset to the country. But we also need individual incentives. Without them, employing young people will become a last resort rather than a priority.
Funnily enough, one of our customers, a highly successful businessman, recently suggested that his 16-year-old daughter should get some work experience at one of our pubs this summer. He clearly understands the importance of her gaining real-world experience to help her grow and develop essential skills. Of course, we will ensure that everything is done within the bounds of legislation, but we will make it work. It is a perfect example of how important it is for young people to engage in the workforce early on.
But our real objective, as a country and an industry, should not be to fail the covid generation a second time be not letting them work. Food for thought.
