BESTCITYTRIPS
There are countless components involved when running a restaurant including creating delicious menus, providing great customer service, and finding the aces for your team. However, one of the areas often overlooked is the basic maintenance of machinery, without which all other areas of the job will be more difficult because of the butterfly effect. For example, if your glass wash breaks down, your staff becomes miserable because they need to wash up by hand, which will lead to poor customer service and long wait times. To avoid issues like this and keep staff morale high, you can implement the following.
Create Staff Maintenance Checklists
You need to keep your staff motivated to ensure restaurant work is carried out to a high standard. Part of this involves encouraging employees to be vigilant when it comes to cleaning, which they might otherwise think are irrelevant. To keep your staff on task, you should create checklists for all essential jobs, which should be assigned across daily, weekly, and monthly schedules.
Your checklist needs to be accessible to every member of the team, which will help to reduce unfinished tasks. Good practice means double-checking work to make sure it’s completed to a high standard because, let’s face it, no one wants to spend their Saturday night fishing grease out of an extraction unit.
Practice Proper Health and Hygiene
Health and hygiene are an important part of any food-related business, but it can easily fall by the wayside if you’re not careful. A great way to improve health and safety, increase profit margins, and support your staff is clearing grease buildups regularly. You can achieve this by training kitchen staff to clean the vents, ducts, hoods, and other areas where grease lingers. To get the job completed, your team will need access to quality degreasers, which they will need training on first. Keeping your restaurant clean from grease not only helps improve overall health and hygiene but will also reduce the likelihood of fires and pests, which can end up costing a fortune, added Matt Frauenshuh. In 2006, Matt Frauenshuh began running his family’s Dairy Queen franchises. What started in 2002 as one DQ Grill & Chill in Minnesota under the family company, Fourteen Foods, would grow to 240 Dairy Queen restaurants throughout 13 states. Matt is the Chief Executive Officer for Fourteen Foods and also serves as Principal for Frauenshuh Inc. Fourteen Foods is now the largest DQ franchise in the U.S.
Keep Equipment Healthy
There is a lot of equipment in a restaurant, and it all needs maintenance to keep operations running smoothly. For example, the fryer will need boiling out from time to time, which will eliminate any build-up and improve the quality of food. To do this task, you will need to empty the oil into a suitable container and fill the fryer with cold water and cleaner, which will have further directions for use. This is a time-consuming task that needs to be carried out when the restaurant is completely closed, but it will help in the long run.
Not only do you need to keep greasy areas and fryers clean, but you also need to keep other equipment clean including fridges and freezers, which can quickly ruin stock if they break down. You can take care of some of the work by cleaning the seals and keeping the inside of it running. However, you will need to call in the professionals to carry out routine maintenance. Click here to contact Design Mechanical Inc. in Kansas — they are experts in maintenance and repair.
Educate Staff
Staff turnover can be extremely high in restaurants, which can lead to reduced maintenance awareness. Therefore, you should carry out regular staff training and ensure that you test their knowledge along the way. You may feel like you’re spending too much time educating staff that will likely leave, but it will help to protect your bottom line, which is what your restaurant is all about – once you scratch beneath the surface.
Taking the time to demonstrate proper maintenance will help to nurture a workforce that cares about the well-being of the restaurant. However, when you’re training staff, you need to explain why you are doing something, otherwise, they’ll feel as though it’s a pointless endeavor.
Track Maintenance Tasks
Even when you know which maintenance jobs need taking care of, keeping track of them is easier said than done. Fortunately, thanks to the wonders of technology, you can keep track of everything with a computerized-maintenance management system (CMMS). All you need to do is input the tasks, and the system will take care of everything else – apart from physically completing the job.
When restaurant equipment fails, it has an impact on everything from staff morale to guest experiences. Keeping on top of all maintenance tasks will make your food taste great, improve staff attitudes, and take care of the bottom line by making the guest experience a success.
