Opinion piece by Alastair Scott
It seems to me that one of the best skills to have under your belt in hospitality is the ability to recognise the need for change, and then practice and embed new habits. As an industry, I think we’ve all become accustomed to a lot of change over the last few years. Some good, some bad. But new habits reap new rewards.
I was at Lisboeta last month and was very impressed when every member of staff said hello and smiled at me when I arrived. I counted 7 in all. An action so simple, but it made a big difference to me. A smile tells you to come in, sit down, and enjoy your time, however long. It makes you stay that bit longer and order one more drink.
Compare this to staff members who avoid catching your eye when you walk in. In other words, saying: ‘we’re too busy, understaffed and trying to turnover tables as quickly as possible.’ I know what kind of habits I’d rather embed in my business.
Experts say it takes a month to embed a habit. So, imagine what you could do in a year if you knew what behavioural changes to work on within your team. How much could you increase employee engagement and productivity?
I want to talk about the difficulty of changing behavioural habits, compared to what I call ‘process habits’. The latter, I think, are much easier to change. Take the big move away from paper rotas to online rotas over the last 20 years: once businesses decided to change how they were writing schedules, it only took the investment in software to change the operational habit. There is of course something to be said about using systems to enforce permanent habit change, but that’s another article.
Behavioural habits, on the other hand, are much harder to change. There isn’t yet a piece of software that can automate a smile on your staff member’s face. That job falls to management.
How? We’ve all heard about the many different ways to grow productivity in our teams, but ultimately, it stems from finding the right ways to encourage change in each individual.
For me, the first step for initiating any change is transparency and consistency in communication. Observe and learn the areas of your business that need improving – is there a tendency amongst staff to stand and talk for 10 minutes around the dishwasher, rather than getting on with a task that could add value? Learn behaviours and tailor training and tasks to encourage change.
Let staff demonstrate initiative and accountability by encouraging them to take ownership of their roles: what do they think they could do when it comes to dealing with customers or product suggestions? Every day, we need to find the right way to nudge people forward, praising them when they smile and encouraging those who don’t. It will make up for a whole number of small mistakes, costs nothing and of course, these changes in habits and education should drive value and profits. They just need to be thought through in a way that process changes do not.
The strive for productive and engaged staff is what we are all trying to achieve. So, as we start the journey for more smiles and more hellos, I had better be prepared.