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Why is employee engagement meaningful?
The Society for Human Resource Management indicates that employee engagement is a proportion of a staff member's willingness to go above and beyond, positive feelings about their manager, and expected to remain with their employer.
If your employees are not engaged, you'll begin to see a decline in productivity and less energy at work. Team culture is greatly affected when the employees aren't excited about their work or work environment.
On the other hand, what sort of behavior do well-engaged workers display? They create a culture of camaraderie and energy at work. They believe in what they do and accordingly get higher benefits by treating clients better and upselling.
Ways of Tracking Employee Engagement at Your Restaurant
Using value-based employment to find workers who suit your restaurant's culture can improve employee engagement and increase retention levels. The initial phase in building up engagement has the option to quantify it. Dissimilar to profit and loss, an effective restaurant success metric, worker commitment is more difficult to gauge. Luckily, we have broad involvement in restaurant staff engagement. These are our top ways to measure it:
Ask Staff for Shift Feedback
The 7shifts Engage feature robotizes feedback assortment by requesting that staff rate their shifts. If you don't have 7shifts yet, you can create a basic Google Form overview or a paper survey for staff to fill out after each shift. The overview can essentially request that staff rate their shift on a scale of one to three and provide a section for additional remarks.
Track Worker Participation
Your staff planning tool will allow you to see who is coming in late or leaving early, who has skipped shifts, requested the most days off, and so forth. These ways of behaving are indications of employee disengagement.
Focus on Staff Performance
Staff performance is crucial for income generation. Use information from your Point of Sale (POS) to see which representative served the least tables, upsold the least, got the least tips, etc. Poor performance is an indicator of disengaged employees.
Ways to Improve Engagement and Gamify Performance by Using Employee Engagement
Data obtained from quantifying engagement at your restaurant helps you transform employee engagement into a game to boost creativity, efficiency, and motivation.
Here are some ways you can gamify worker performance and boost engagement.
1. The Employee of the Month
Honoring your top-performing employee with the title above boosts morale. You can choose a performance metric to focus on. It may be a similar one every month (for example, most income produced), or you switch things up each month to feature staff individuals' various gifts (ex: most cooperative, best upseller, etc.).Inform your staff of the criteria they will be rewarded for and regularly post results on a leaderboard. This award motivates employees resulting in a good performance and little competition.
You don't need to invest in costly awards to boost engagement. Honoring the employee of the month by hanging their picture up on a worker hall of fame and reporting their accomplishments during a staff meeting engages the staff and makes them happier at work.
You don't need to put resources into costly awards to support commitment. You can respect the representative of the month by hanging their image upon a worker's lobby of notoriety and reporting their accomplishments during a staff meeting.
2. Bonuses
Offering bonuses for outstanding performances also aids in gamifying staff performance and boosting morale. You could choose a key performance indicator vital to your business and then utilize your POS to see which worker has outperformed the others in that class.
Offering rewards for quotas instead of winner takes all approach helps keep the competition friendly.
3. Professional Development
Whenever restaurateurs offer their workers opportunities for proceeding with their training, it shows that they are investing in their future at the restaurant. Professional development opportunities can also be provided through cross-training, shadowing, and online courses.
You can offer various educational tracks for multiple positions, however, offer staff the opportunity to develop their skills outside of their assigned roles.
4. Milestones
Acknowledgment goes far with regards to keeping staff engaged. It's exciting for a team to be acknowledged internally; however, it's much more fulfilling to be recognized by clients.
A straightforward method for giving your workers outside acknowledgment is to provide them with stickers, pins, or identifications that they can wear on their regalia or unofficial IDs after achievements in business.
Workers will feel proud of their accomplishments at work when they are recognized both by the management and clients. Milestones will result in workers being more engaged.
Conclusion
Worker engagement is essential for a restaurant's longevity. Engaged workers best serve their clients and colleagues and are least likely to leave you searching for other opportunities.
Track worker engagement with tools like 7shifts. Watch out for shift criticism, participation, and execution to recognize disengaged employees.
When you have this information, you can use it to keep your employee performance high by gamifying work. If work is fun or competitive, your staff is more engaged.
