What do we call all the tasks that we have to do as a business that are outside of service? Non-service tasks? Fixed tasks? At S4labour, we call them admin (management tasks) and prep (getting ready, either front of house or back of house). But what are these tasks, when should we do them and how much time do they take? Let’s take each in turn.
There are a few examples I can use here to highlight the challenge of even defining the tasks. Do we treat cutlery polishing as prep (for the next day), or is it a task to be done during service? What about stacking glass or the dishwasher? Some days, you are better to run short and do these tasks after service, but on other days, they might need to be in-service tasks – either because you need the teapots or because there isn’t the space to stack the dirties.
So, we will all have different versions of what we might call prep tasks, some of which will be service tasks and included within the deployment graphs, and some of which aren’t.
I think kitchen prep will have a more uniform definition – that is anything that needs to be done to be ready for service. But even then, the devil is in the detail. Let’s take our traditional Sunday roast. Most of the work – cooking the potatoes or making the gravy – is a prep task, but we might classify it as a service task. Once the potatoes are in the tray, the workload for service is low as they just need to go in the oven and get shaken occasionally to brown evenly all over. The skill is in putting the potatoes in the oven at the right time to come out and get used fast enough not to go soft. And the gravy is hopefully just bubbling on the hob, low enough so it doesn’t catch on the bottom, but ready to be ladled onto the plate or into the jug.
So much of a Sunday lunch moves from substantially service to substantially prep – I don’t know anyone who doesn’t do their Yorkshires ahead of service. Even most of a burger might be prep – with the tomato, lettuce, cheese and gherkin all ready to go, and with only assembly and grilling required during service.
Once the tasks are defined, when should we do them? We have developed a successful methodology of slack tasks and fixed tasks, trying to split each into a task that can be done when we are quiet, rather than someone being given specific hours to cover it. Once we understand how team capability is measured, we also understand that there is in-built slack.
I asked one of our consultants what proportion of tasks should be slack, and his answer was all of them! I like the intent, but I still think line cleaning, pre-opening and a few others are fixed tasks, even if we can move some of them to the middle of the day or the middle of service.
Once you have decided what the tasks are, and whether they are fixed or slack, you need to decide how long they take. If you sell 1,000 burgers a day, it is probably worth measuring how long it takes to get the tomato from the packet to the service line. I once did some work for an airport where laying the bacon on the trays to get cooked was a four-hour job every day. And, if we go back to front of house, how long it takes to do recruitment every week is a difficult call but still needs an estimate.
But the most important and difficult decision is deciding when to do them. Are they a slack task, to be done when there is a quiet time during service, or a fixed task, as a designated activity with a time set against it? It is easier for the team to create fixed tasks (please come in early to look at all the emails), than create a slack task (please go on the bar in the afternoon and do your emails at the same time).
And this is the challenge that we can’t ignore; fixed tasks are damaging our industry. We are at the point now where because the cost of labour is so high that we can’t ignore all these small, difficult but important changes that together make a massive difference to our businesses. So, take the first step.
Alastair Scott is chief executive of S4labour and owner of Malvern Inns
