I was on my way to meet a client the other day and decided to grab some coffee and a hashbrown from a local fast-food establishment. When I pulled around to the window, the person asked for payment and handed me my receipt. They did not say “Good Morning” nor “Thank you” when I rendered payment. The person at the pickup window was the same, they just handed me my coffee and closed the window.
I have a colleague whose business has 3.7 stars out of 5 on Google reviews and when I asked him why that was, he replied, “I have crappy employees, so the service is terrible, what am I supposed to do?” That statement could have led to a deep conversation about how wrong he was, but instead I shared with him the same principles I’m sharing with you today.
There’s no such thing as a bad employee!
My statement would be incorrect if a store manager opens the doors each morning and whomever walks in is allowed to put on a uniform and serve customers. However, if the server went through an onboarding process, training, and was there because the manager put them there, then their behavior is only a symptom of a deeper problem.
The first principle has to do with setting clear management expectations, outcomes, and accountabilities. Whether the establishment is a franchise or family-owned business, there must be a clear understanding between the owners and the management team. Holding your management team to revenue and budget goals isn’t enough. They must recognize how those goals are achieved.
For example, if an analysis was run on the days when the store achieved the desired revenue level, it would invariably show things like how many transactions occurred, units sold during that time, which products, and staffing levels.
The store manager could take that information and build a metric around achieving the same outcome on a consistent basis. First by training all the other managers and key holders on the design of the metric, as well as the functionality of what makes it work. The better they understand the key roles in reaching the desired outcomes, the better they will be at sourcing employees that can execute their strategies. This includes analyzing what changes as they implement the metric across other shifts.
The second principle is to hire with precision. With a detailed understanding of what makes the strategy work, the management teams need to hire for the individual functions rather than general “warm body” accumulation.
If the researched showed customers responded better on days when the drive-thru functioned at a certain pace, then hire people who come from backgrounds that had high volume interactions. However, the manager needs to look at that high volume background in context to what they need.
For example, they may interview a short order cook who worked in a restaurant that served 500 people a day. While the natural tendency would be to put him/her on the grill, I would consider putting them at the drive-thru window, because they would be strong at coordinating with those who provide the food for the customers, both from helping the existing cooks getting it done more efficiently, to making sure the customer has everything they ordered.
Using this type of purposeful hiring will expand the range of people to be considered and the managers can simply choose the right person for each function. This will also help the store manager develop employee modeling based on the consistencies observed from their top performers, which allows for peer-to-peer training and accountability.
What is most interesting is once I began implementing this strategy during my 20+ years of retail management I found two things to be true. First, the top performers always brought their friends in for interviews and second manager turnover was virtually non-existent.
Therefore, if your company is suffering from “bad employees”, it’s because of poor planning and leadership. I don’t say that as a criticism, but a wake-up call to examine your house if you are not meeting revenue expectations or suffer from poor customer reviews.
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Previously Published on Medium
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