Last year, I wrote an article on a few of the habits I wanted to embed in our two village Gastro pubs. I believe my focus at the time was on trying to implement three specific practices: hellos and goodbyes, never using the word ‘ok,’ and what I refer to as ‘restaurant eyes.’
Our results using habits
Now enough time has passed, I am pleased to report that the implementation of the first two has gone pretty well. Now, I never (I know, brave word), hear the word ‘ok’ in our pubs. Albeit, admittedly I have heard a few substitutes! Really, what we are trying to get to with this habit is asking open-ended questions. “Would you like another glass of wine?” or “how is your fish and chips?” are much better than asking “are you ok for drinks”, or “is your food ok?”.
The second habit, hellos and goodbyes, has also gotten much better. Earlier this week I heard the best ‘hello,’ in fact. Rachel (who will be reading this) was behind the coffee machine and she peered out, gave a great ‘hello’ to the guests as they were walking in. I could see how warm and welcome they felt immediately. Good job!
Sadly, however, mission restaurant eyes was a complete failure. In truth, this was my fault. My idea of ‘restaurant eyes’ is actually a load of things rolled into one – actively making eye contact, not avoiding eye contact, looking around more, and so on. Perhaps this one was not communicated well enough to the team to enable them to focus on it. But I suppose, two out of three is not too bad, so I will take it.
So, has all of this work resulted in anything? In all honesty, not everything can be measured and analysed. While our guest satisfaction scores seem to remain about the same each month, and sales growth, while ok, has not been exceptional, these habits are the right things to do. We also gave each habit a long period to embed, around 3 months. This made a big difference when it came to sticking, and now we will not have to repeat the same process for some time. If you recall, we based our theory on the 66-day rule to form a habit – we loved it so much we even did a podcast on it! It means that if someone is working 5 days a week, it is a 13-week implementation.
What’s next?
This term, we have added three new habits to focus on, in an attempt to hold onto the previous two and make further progress on our service skills. The new habits are as follows: smiles, FIFO, and the four-foot rule.
The first, smiles, is pretty self-explanatory. I am pleased to say that a few weeks ago, I gave out one of our ‘management recognition’ tokens to Doruta. Doruta has been with us for a long time, and she gave the best smile on Valentines Day that I have ever seen from her.
FIFO of course has many meanings. But rather than first in first out, here it means full in full out. This is trying to get our staff, as they return from anywhere, to look for empties to collect along the way, making us more efficient and touching the guest more often. We are far too good at letting the food runners run food only, rather than picking up empty plates as they return. While we do not give the food runner iPad tills, they can quickly find someone else with an iPad if someone wants another drink or anything else.
We have combined this habit with the four-foot rule, which is that you must at least look at the guest if you are within four feet of them and preferably smile and say something. This is a much better first element of ‘restaurant eyes’ as it is more specific for the team as to what they have to do. We will of course have arguments about what is four feet, and whether they all need to do it as they pass a busy table, but at least it will help deliver ‘heads up’ service, rather than trying not to look at the guest in case they ask for something.
Final thoughts on habits in hospitality
So, all in all, this is a process that is here to stay. Each term we will pick the habits we feel we want to drive and try to remain focused on those only for the whole term and then move on to a new one. Even though I am on the old side of the industry, I am still learning to do things better. How I wish I had adopted this decades ago, rather than trying to solve everything too fast and ending up solving nothing. Maybe I am not an Old Dog after all!
Alastair Scott is CEO of S4labour and Owner of Malvern Inns.
