Michelin reports that 7 out of 10 employees in the restaurant industry plan on leaving by the end of the year. Workplace culture plays a major role in this trend, and one of the key issues is employee relations.
Restaurant management can change the tides by focusing on:
- Consistent leadership
- Honest communication
- Genuine commitment
Leadership skills that embody all of these traits lead to higher retention levels and better service. If you want to stop scrambling for new employees and to build a long-lasting team, you can do so by following a leader-centric approach.
Why Leaders Must Take Charge of Workplace Relationships
Culture trickles from the top of the restaurant down, so your employees must witness key changes from leaders first. For example, if there’s an issue that keeps popping up, such as a team member who is dragging others down, the manager must step in to correct the issue.
Often, these issues may involve a friend or an employee whom the manager really likes having on the team.
But just because management likes the person doesn’t mean they get a free pass. In fact, the entire team’s morale can fall apart if leaders don’t take action. For example:
- Jeff’s attitude is causing tension among team members
- John, the manager, decides to reprimand the other employees
- Jeff is let “off the hook” because he is a friend of the owner
When a situation like this occurs, other team members realize that their actions are being reprimanded while the other person receives special treatment. Morale and trust will quickly decline due to this type of favoritism.
Simple changes like checking in with your team can go a long way in identifying and understanding the cultural mix inside the workplace.
But it’s even more important to take corrective action based on this feedback.
Even if the feedback pertains to you or one of the higher-ups in the restaurant, you need to internalize it and make sure that changes are made that are positive and address the problem.
If you under-cut the problem, workplace relationships can suffer.
Under-Correcting is Doing More Harm Than Good
Restaurant employee management requires a lot of uncomfortable decisions. You’ll deal with complex problems that often involve one employee undermining one or more people. If you have a friendly relationship with the person in the wrong, it’s 100% possible that you might under-correct them .
You might be trying to keep the peace, but in the end, this under-correction will have severe consequences.
As a leader, you cannot have the following and hope for real change:
- Vague conversations
- Gentle hints on what to change
- Warnings that have no real consequences
If you have any of these traits in your correction, then it means that the person who receives this information learns that their actions are tolerable .
Leaders have to create the workplace culture that they want - not hope that it happens organically .
You can offer effective correction without being punitive or harsh. What needs to happen is for you to remain clear in your communication, set expectations and follow through with them. If you do this one thing, it helps create a sense of clarity where employees understand that they have to do the right thing or there will be consequences.
Moral of the story: half-measures fail to solve problems, so be sure to correct them fully.
Leaders Need to Understand Work Doesn’t End After Their Shift
You might have a workplace friendship policy in place already and meet with some “offenders” for drinks outside of work. And while there may be nothing wrong with these types of relationships, your leadership skills must be strong enough to realize that dynamics follow others home:
- Anxiety
- Feelings of unfairness
- Interpersonal conflict
- Stress
While one team member may be friendly with you, outside of work, others will still feel this resentment.
Boundaries have become increasingly blurred in recent years, where lines between personal and private lives exist. Employees used to feel a sigh of relief when they clocked out of work, but this comfort has long since dissipated.
Leaders must recognize that caring about what happens outside of work is also part of employee relations because the work culture exists outside of the eatery’s walls.
First Times are Always Hard, But Use Them as a Learning Experience
Restaurant employee management is filled with a lot of hard decisions that you often have to make on your feet. For many people, these first times are difficult to work through, and you’ll likely make missteps along the way.
Avoidance is not the sign of a strong leader, which your team will pick up on.
First discussions or dealing with problems require a constructive approach to understand:
- Did my message land properly?
- What did you say that worked and didn’t work?
- Did you take the time to prepare adequately?
Workplaces that have a good work culture have leaders who keep growing with their teams. If you recognize that your first attempt to resolve an issue could have been stronger, you can use this information to do better next time .
Leaders who make changes that employees recognize gain the respect of their teams.
If you want to improve workplace relationships and strengthen your team, your willingness to do better always matters.
Treat Feedback as Private, Even from Friends
Restaurant management must take feedback seriously, or it will erode trust overnight. Never share private feedback with others. This means never discussing one employee’s:
- Performance with others
- Concerns with others
- Insights with others
Often, when leaders are very friendly with certain employees, this causes the employee to vent about their challenges more openly.
What leaders must recognize and remember is that there needs to be a fine line between professional and personal lives in the workplace.
You cannot consider a friend’s feedback more strongly than another employee’s feedback because that’s not professional. Corrective action must be taken with consideration for the restaurant above all else.
Building a healthy work culture is a lot of ongoing work and it doesn’t happen overnight. It happens when leaders show up consistently for their team as a collective whole rather than what the leader or a single team member thinks.