Many food concessionaires feel that hiring and managing good help is one of the most difficult and frustrating aspects of managing a food concession business. It is also one of the most important.
Working in a food concession is not rocket science. Yet, as a manager, hiring the right people with the right qualities to help your business run smoothly and profitably is often harder than you'd expect. Fortunately, with the right policies you can improve your staff for a more profitable food concession business.
1. Hire the Right People. Successfully staffing your concession business starts with finding and hiring the right people for the job. Honesty and reliability are the first qualities we look for in a concession worker. A worker who also learns quickly and can multi-task is much better. If they are also friendly, outgoing, and energetic they are ideal. Perhaps, equally important; because the success of a food concession business depends on maximizing production during peak times, so a worker must be able to work quickly and competently, while confidently managing hordes of impatient, hungry customers.
2. Be Honest with Your Staff. Be honest and straight-forward with your staff. Articulate your specific expectations and possible reasons for termination. By initiating an honest, fair-minded, and team-oriented policy from the outset, the incentive for dishonesty may be eliminated.
3. Guard Against Theft. In most cases a concession worker will spend much of his or her time being the cashier. This creates frequent opportunities to pocket on the sly. The best defense you have against theft is to, first, know your business. Although you may never catch the thief in the act, you should always have a pretty good idea how much revenue the booth has produced and a good instinct for inconsistencies. Requiring the cashier to verbalize each order, the price, and amount in change made to the customer, lets you know what has transpired at the register even when your back is turned. This policy also protects the cashier from the customer who makes false accusations that an error was made.
4. Articulate Your Standards. Address the intangible aspects of your business. By articulating your high standards for cleanliness, product quality, service quality, and appropriate interaction with the public, your workers will be clear where you stand on their role in representing your business.
5. Reward Your Staff. Beyond the reward of earning a decent pay, sometimes it's the little things that inspire good employees. Let them know how much you appreciate their help. Have fun in the booth. Further, by placing a tip jar on the front counter for your workers they receive instant gratification and motivation for providing your customers with good service. And, the ritualistic counting of the tip jar at the end of a busy day has its own rewards.
Although all of these policies will surely help you build your staff management skills, there are many more worth mentioning, and I'd be curious to know what other policies you'd add to this list.
From our newsletter archives from Barb Fitzgerald of FoodBooth.net
