Speed of Service 3: Right Number of People in the Right Place at the Right Time

The third point to better speed of service is to have the right number of people in the right place at the right time. This begins with a properly done crew schedule, and ends with the manager on duty positioning his people correctly.

A properly done crew schedule is more than just putting names on the page. It considers the sales projections carefully as well as the abilities of the people. Nothing hurts worse than having no one that knows cash register or (worse!) having all cashiers and no one that knows how to make food! The sales projections will help with getting the right number of people for the sales volume. The schedule maker must then determine who to put at that particular time.

The manager on duty must then, with the people given him, make the determination of who to put where. Most places provide a chart that helps you determine where to put people based on the number of people and projected sales volume.

The challenge now becomes keeping the people organized in the assigned positions, because most people don’t like being confined to just one spot for very long. Especially if there’s downtime. But it’s essential to have the people ready to serve the customers. Precious seconds can be lost waiting for someone to return to his position or having to fill that position to the neglect of another.

Keeping people organized is the hardest, but most essential part, of this job.

Speed of Service 2: Organize for Speed

The question of lowering speed of service comes to every fast food manager. Let’s face it–considerable pressure is applied from above to achieve and maintain a gold standard service time. In a previous post, I have identified six points for faster service. I am now discussing each one in separate post.

Point 2 is organize for speed. In the drive-thru, everything should be organized for speed. Each condiment and supply should be within arm’s reach of the drive-thru attendant. They should remain in a consistent place from one day to the next so that precious seconds aren’t lost looking for them. Ideally, the drive-thru area should be a small space so that precious seconds aren’t wasted walking from one counter to another in order to retrieve something. That way, everything stays at an arm’s length.

The drive-thru area should never be messy. Each item should have a place and be in its place at all times. Again, this helps save precious seconds.

Organization isn’t just for items in the drive-thru. Same thing goes for the people that staff the drive-thru. The people should remain in their positions at all times, waiting to serve the customers. In a perfect world, that would be possible. But we live in a world where the only thing that matters more than the drive thru time is the cost of labor. That means that people can’t just be standing around idly; they must keep busy with other tasks.

At all costs, minimize the tasks that the drive-thru attendants work on. This way, they can be ready to serve customers. At Burger King, it is easy to have the drive thru attendant stock the Kid’s Meal bags, since these bags are usually kept in a box near the drive-thru station. It is “busy work” that can be abandoned in favor of waiting on a customer at any time and returned to just as easily. Any task assigned to the drive-thru attendant should fit that same bill: easy to leave, easy to return to.

The next item for our consideration is having the right people in the right place at the right time. That goes hand-in-hand with organization. Instead of organizing products, it is organizing people. We’ll cover that tomorrow.

Speed of Service 1: Be a Leader

It’s a question faced by every fast food manager at some point in his career: how do I decrease my speed of service? Let’s face it–there is a lot of pressure from above you to do so. Most of the time, the higher-ups will not accept the fact that customers do a lot of little things to increase your speed of service (e.g. not having money ready or taking a super-long time to order). But it’s pointless to vilify the customer when there is so much that can be done by the store’s employees to decrease speed of serivce.

In the previous post, I identified six points for faster service. I will now expound on what they mean. The first point is to simply be a leader. What does that mean?

As the visible head of the organization, your people look to you to get their cues. They actually follow you. Which means that if you’re all about speed of service, then they will be all about speed of service. If you act like speed of service isn’t a big deal, then so will they.

Start by clearly defining the speed of service goal for the shift. At Burger King, our gold standard is less than two minutes and thirty seconds. So I establish that as the goal right off the bat, and I communicate that goal to everyone. Our timer gives an average when there are no cars in drive-thru, so on the rare chance that the drive-thru is empty, I call the time out and give everyone feedback on how they’re doing–either positive or negative.

In his book The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, John Maxwell talks about the Law of Navigation, which says that only a leader can chart the course. It is up to the leader to chart the course on speed of service. The old axiom holds true: “Whoever fails to plan plans to fail.” You need a solid plan in addition to motivation. You need to chart the course. People need to be placed right, the store needs to be set up right, there needs to be enough food to get you through the rush so that everyone can be assisting customers and helping out with service instead of cooking. These points will be covered in later posts, but they’re worth noting at least for now.

In short, if speed of service is in all you say and do, that will rub off on your people and they will be all about speed, too. Clearly define an appropriate goal. Plan your shift to meet that goal, and set up your store for speed.

Six Tips for Getting Better Speed of Service Results

There are many ways to improve speed of service results. Here are six possibilities:

1. Be a leader
2. Organize for speed
3. Right number of people in the right place at the right time
4. Stock enough product, condiments, and other supplies
5. Use enough headsets
6. Execute speedy procedures

Each day over the next week, we’ll discuss a different point.

These points will only help your restaurant get faster. If you want to bring customers back, you can’t just practice speed of service. You need to practice speed with service. Customers will respond to fast, friendly service. Taking care of your customers is what will bring them back time and time again.

P/PC Balance

In The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey relates the importance of what he refers to as the P/PC Balance.  He uses the fable about the goose who lays the golden egg to illustrate his point.

For those of us that can’t remember that fable, the story goes that a farmer one day discovers that his goose laid a golden egg.  On a whim, he takes it to town to have it appraised, and it turns out that it is solid gold.  He’s rich!  And so it continues–day after day the goose lays just one golden egg.  Eventually, the farmer’s greed gets the better of him, and he kills the goose in order to retrieve all of the eggs at once.  However, he finds the goose empty and now he has killed the only way to produce the eggs in the first place.  So now he is neither rich nor able to get rich.

In this story is a solid truth.  Effectiveness isn’t the amount that you produce (the golden egg), but is a function of what you produce (the egg) and your capacity to produce it (the goose).  It is very important to keep the two in balance.  That is the P/PC Balance: production to production capacity.

Suppose you intend to become a district manager upon taking over your first restaurant.  Your goal is to produce the best service times, the best food cost, and the best bottom line so that the powers that be will notice you.  So you work your people to the point of physical resentment to get the service times, you sell every bit of food in your restaurant, and you don’t purchase anything unless your current DM makes you.

What are the results going to be?  Well, you might get noticed and promoted, but what is your successor going to face?  She will find that turnover is outrageous, no one likes or trusts management, and morale is low.  She will discover that no customer loyalty exists because they are being served poor quality food; which is disastrous in a business that is built on repeat customers.  She will find that all of the equipment needs major overhauls because simple maintenance wasn’t done and parts weren’t purchased.  Production exists, but the capacity is dwindling.

Find the balance and maintain it.  Doing that alone will increase the effectiveness of your management skills tenfold.

Habits 1 and 2 of Highly Effective People

The first habit of highly effective people, according to Stephen Covey, is to be proactive.  The second habit is to begin with the end in mind.  If more fast food managers adopted these habits, we wouldn’t have half of the problems with fast food managers that we do.

I first encountered the second habit in the book Lead or Get off the Pot by Pat Croce.  I can’t say that it has always influenced me as much as it should.  It isn’t a habit.  Starting with my next store assignment, I am going to ingrain this habit into my head; I am going to always start a new assignment with what I want to accomplish by the end of the assignment.

In this particular case, it is promotion to the rank of senior manager.  I have a long way to go–senior manager is two levels above my current rank.  It is reserved for folks who are general management material but who have no store yet.  This is a manager who leads in place of the current store’s GM.  The Go-To Guy.  Every step I take from the start of the new assignment will be taken with the goal of senior manager in mind.  In a future post, I’ll break down the vision I have for being a senior manager and offer some commentary on the action steps that I will take.

If only every fast food manager began new assignments with specific goals in mind.  Most, however, begin a new assignment with nothing more in mind than running a few shifts and doing what they are told.  This leads us to the next point: being proactive.

For the food service manager, food prep is the place where being proactive helps out the most.  I’ve noted that most managers, when they show up for work, dive in and start helping to alleviate the rush that is inevitably going on at that moment.  That is a huge mistake.  The first thing that the incoming manager should do is check on all food prep.  At Burger King, I check the salads, bacon, tomatoes, onions, mac & cheese, and all of the kitchen stock levels (burgers, Whoppers, and fried product) when I walk in the door.  If something is low, I mentally note it and look for an opening in the business to fix it.  The second thing to check is the cleanliness of the dining room (which includes the trash) and then the cleanliness of the kitchen.  If something is amiss, send someone to take care of it.  Then I check the back-of-house: the dishes, the trash, and the paperwork.  If all is good, then I start helping clear the rush.

After the rush is clear, it is time to confer with the outgoing manager.  There is usually at least some overlap between management shifts, and communication is the key reason for that overlap.

Instead, how do most fast food managers manage?  They react to problems as they come up instead of identifying potential problems ahead of time and fixing them.  As much as we all might hate to admit this, the flowcharts and checklists put out by the company help a lot with being proactive.  As human beings, we are bound to forget something if we try to go it on our own.  Following these aids to the letter is a sure way to run a smooth shift.

QUICK POLL: Should I Keep this Site Going?

I’ve noticed from the site statistics that there are a number of people interested in what this site has to offer.  The question is, are you learning something from this site?  If you like what you see on this site, drop a comment on this entry and encourage me to keep going.  Otherwise, I’m going to shut this site down permanently because I have only so much time.

Alternatively, you could send me an e-mail: tucholskic@gmail.com.

I look forward to some feedback!

I Have Returned!

After a very long absence, I have returned to this blog and I will begin posting new material this week.  My goal is to produce at least two new articles each week based on reading a best selling leadership manual.  I will fine tune the ideas of the book for fast food management, as I did with the One Minute Manager series.

I appreciate everyone’s patience.  Look for some articles on The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People starting later this week!

10 Steps to Empowerment 10: Respect

I’ve heard it said once that you must seek first to understand, then be understood. This is the cornerstone of respect.

Respect is the perfect closing step to empowerment because each other point requires the manager to respect his employees. Clearly defining job responsibilities shows respect. Giving people the proper authority is a sign of respect for their work performance. Setting high standards of excellence show respect for the employee’s ability to achieve those standards. Training and developing employees shows respect for their track record and for the potential you see in them. Providing knowledge, feedback, and recognition show respect. Trust and respect go hand-in-hand with each other. Granting permission to fail shows that you respect their ability to learn from their own mistakes.

10 Steps to Empowerment 9: Permission to Fail

I’ve heard it said once that defeat can be more instructive than victory. A quick glance at history shows that the people who have achieved the most failed quite a bit. Abraham Lincoln ran for public office six times before he was elected. Thomas Edison tried 2,500 times to invent the light bulb. Albert Einstein failed math. Bill Gates tried to sell Microsoft to IBM to avoid bankruptcy. J.K. Rowling was rejected by an untold number of publishers, most of whom said that Harry Potter wouldn’t appeal to anyone. Babe Ruth holds the record for home runs and strike outs. Terry Bradshaw is the only Hall of Fame Quarterback with more interceptions than touchdown passes.

I could list more examples. But the point is that unless a person tries and fails, he’ll never learn what real success is. And that’s the point of the principle of empowerment: giving permission to fail.

Success and failure go hand-in-hand. That may seem counterintuitive to many, but upon reflection, most people decide that it’s true. This is a world defined by opposites. How can we know that one woman is beautiful unless we can see another who isn’t? How do we know what good is unless we see what evil is? This great philosophical truth means that we will never achieve success without failing first.

This principle is the toughest so far to implement in a high volume business like fast food, because even the smallest failure can create a chain reaction that will wreck the entire shift. We all know that it isn’t fun to play catch up. But, we must contrast that with the fact that most fast food places encourage mediocrity in its employees. We’ve discussed that failure is the key to success already. So without permission to fail, all we do is encourage more mediocrity. This is a vicious cycle. In order to succeed, we must occasionally fail.

I believe that the key to fast food success is nothing less than consistency. If, as a manager, you have a consistent record of success, then you can point to that record when you fail. Therefore, you may give your employees permission to fail, shoot for higher goals, and if a mistake causes everything to crash, just stand on your past record.

Before this principle can be applied, you, the manager, must create a track record of success. These will likely be small successes at first, since without permission to fail, the larger goals will be out of your reach. Small successes include good health inspections and other visits, a good rapport with direct and higher supervisors, a desire to advance to higher positions, good cash control, and consistent speed of service. Build a lot of these small successes and then you will have permission to fail from your supervisors–within certain limits. Know what those limits are.

Then build an environment that doesn’t penalize failure; but rather, penalizes inactivity or indecision. Tell people, in no uncertain terms, that you want them to make decisions for themselves. It is better to have made a decision–even a wrong decision–then to not do anything. Support and encourage them when they fail, and reaffirm their worth as people and as members of your team.

I’ve discussed One Minute Reprimands and I still believe that they are the best way to reprimand an employee. When someone does fail, they should still be subject to one of these, especially if it is a large failure. Giving people permission to fail is a separate idea from building an environment where people don’t care whether or not they do fail. There should still be consequences.

Remember that you must be in control when you give your reprimand. If you humiliate someone, then you will have destroyed all of your hard work to create an environment where people have permission to fail. The crazy lady in our marketing department has a quote in the signature of her e-mail that applies here: “They may forget what you said, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel.” Always make people feel like they are an important part of your team, even when they fail, and you will have very happy employees who are willing to take risks.

In the end, an environment like this will produce better results for your company.