My passion is to tell everyone about the change which will happen when they start listening to their customers and employees.
A very common finding in employee surveys is the feeling of employees not being listened to by the management.
Restaurants are usually busy places, where the staff is often more oriented to customer service and hard working rather than co-operation and leadership of people. It is only natural that the voice of the employee is not necessarily heard in such a complex and demanding environment. Especially with restaurant chains, where employees are based on several spots, it is basically impossible for the management to have continuous and sufficient interaction with everyone.
All workplaces have sometimes challenges with leadership and culture. When negative issues start piling up, they may quickly become too difficult to solve by any simple actions. In restaurants, and other workplaces as well, the consequence can be unhappy employees who do not wish to stay and unhappy customers who won’t come back. Traditional surveys take weeks to conduct and report. They are too slow for today’s fast changing environment. Besides, is it even possible to understand the employee experience through a survey where the questions are based on predefined assumptions?
The positive circle
The best solution for anyone who wishes to improve employee satisfaction, and make an effort for customer retention, is to start listening to their employees in real-time.
It means being available for the employees 24/7 and acting based on the received feedback. Sounds like an overload? It doesn’t have to be.
Taplause is a feedback channel designed for this purpose. While being a very efficient management tool, it is at the same time the most convenient way for people to provide their feedback. When employees again feel that the management is listening and open for ideas, the feelings of trust, security and co-operation among individuals and the whole organisation get stronger. Everyone wants to feel involved and appreciated. Those are some of our basic psychological needs which cannot be neglected for too long. We just forget it so easily in the busy business environment.
Positive emotions turn into personal resources which enable people to perform better at work:
- serve customers mindfully,
- prepare excellent dishes,
- be a great employee and colleague.
As the result of simply listening and being open to your employees’ thoughts, a very powerful positive circle emerges.
Satisfied restaurant employees want to stay with their employer. They spread around good things among each other and customers. Happy employees are so good at their work that they make the customers want to visit again.
Easy and effective feedback
Getting direct and real-time feedback from employees can be very easy but still effective.
First, let the employees indicate whether they are satisfied or not. Then allow them to freely express their thoughts, ideas, feelings, motivations and wishes.
If they want to stay anonymous, it should be totally fine. It is understandable that the most urgent and critical issues, which in fact are the most valuable for the management to find out, are given as anonymous feedback. However, sometimes people want to give their name and contact information to be available to continue discussion. And when talking about feedback, we should remember that it is not the synonym for reclamation. As a matter of fact, the majority of the feedback received via Taplause (www.taplause.com) is positive.
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