Your Attitude, and It's Effect on Your Staff and Guests

The way you treat your employees is the way your guests will be treated. Here's why and what you can do if your great attitude is eluding you.

Monkey See! Monkey Do!

Your service staff are probably more intelligent than monkeys, but there is a definite correlation between your staff feeling your fury and guests not feeling welcome. There are several reasons for this:

The way you act depicts what you care about. Believe it or not, your service staff looks up to you for leadership and example. Your problems outside the workplace, or your current pet peeve, deserve to take a chunk out of your dedication to creating an awesome workplace and amazing experience for your guests? Well of course my problems are just as important, if not more so, I have three kids you know, and the oldest one just got suspended...

You are on the wrong side of the door. You are probably familiar with the policy of leaving your problems at the door. Some supervisors repeat it like a mantra when employee moral goes down and common denominator is soda fountain complaint departments. Sometimes you are the problem. If you have a negative attitude, and are always present like a good supervisor should be, then you've put a large unnecessary strain on their workday. Remind you of your supervisors?

Practice Makes Perfect. Many service issues, I'd say 40-60% depending on the style of service you provide, occur and are adressed before the guest is even aware that there had been a problem. Adressing these problems with a positive attitude is an opportunity to get the point across. There is NO problem that a guest can bring you that deserves a negativity in respond. This also goes for attitudes, if you can be behave in a fantastic manner, despite meeting workplace of grumpy staff, your staff can be just as spectacular

Create a positive work environment is a line seen in a lot supervision job descriptions. Even if it is not in yours, it should be noted that good employees will pick up on your good habits and increase your guests experience, but only your great employees can overcome your bad attitude.

Getting Your Groove Back

Determin the cause. Not in general, I mean right now. Yes, different bad moods are handled differently. The good thing is 80% of them fall into one catagory. Personal problems are those problems that occur outside of the workplace. Some times they are constant problems that we have to deal with day in day out, and sometimes they are new experiences that we aren't quite sure how to handle yet. Breath in, breath out. You are officially on vacation from those. For the next five, six, eight hours you cannot do a thing about these problems. Nothing you can do. Nothing that they can do to you. Go find something to do, you are at work to be busy, smile because you've a achieved something today.

Your bosses effect you attitude too. You can be the victem of trickle down syndrome too. The obstacle is that you can't get away with telling them that their attitude is the source of your poor performance any more than your service staff can. The great thing about being a supervisor is that your boss usually isn't around, so he or she can be handled in much the same way as personal problems. If your boss happens to overbearing, or present for any other reason, there is a way to handle that too. Remember what I said earlier about great employees? You can be a great supervisor, by acknowledging your bosses problems for what they are, his own human error and a flaw in his skill set, and working above and beyond his example.

Attitude trickles up the ladder too. Every service member has the potential to have a bad day. Some will be very good at it too. If you spend much time at the soda fountain you might hear tails of such heartbreaking tragedy that Lifetime has begun writing screneplay to aire in the spring. Your staff has been informed that a great attitude is part of their uniform. Individual cases of bad attitude can be handled on a case by case basis. Is everything alright? (Be sincere!) Then why don't you have a great attitude today? (The better the adjective, the better the attitude!) Do you have a spare in your car? (Comic relief.) Are you going to be able to work today?(Sincerity again) You may not think that their concern merits that last question, but it offers them the realization that they can't bring any issues into the workplace.

Resolving Excessive Smoking with Restaurant Servers

It might be easier than you think to get your servers to stop taking excessive smoke brakes, from taking advantage of statewide bans, to using it as an opportuntiy to refocus servers.

Don't Permit Illegal Smokebreaks.

In most states, smoking anywhere on the premises is illegal. In these states it's a simple matter, don't smoke smoke at work. Period. It may seem like a matter of employee moral to let them slip out back and smoke behind the garbage cans, or anywhere else they can find to discreetly get their nicotine fix. This leeway could easily cost you anywhere from a handful of 25 dollar fines to a stiff 500 dollar fine, depending where you're located.

Pay Attention to Responsible Smokers

If smoking indoors, or on the premises is still legal in your state, you probably spend a lot of time checking the breakroom and the back door in order to get your neglected tables well taken care of. You may have tried policies with stiff penalties for being caught smoking without permission, leaving you handing out smoke breaks like a teacher hands out restroom passes. Put the responsibility of being aware in the server's hands. Inform them that smoke breaks are permitted when things are slow, work is caught up, and guests are taken care of. Ban smoking during periods of time that are especially busy for your store, like the lunch rush hours and dinner rush hours. Pay attention to the state of affairs when servers ask for permission to smoke. This gives you a chance to organically discover irresponsible servers. You might find that your smoking problem is one or two servers who slip away with bad behavoir enough to make your other service staff members feel like you really don't care about the issue anyways.

I Am the Boss, I Am in Control

That may seem like an unnecessary and egotistic mantra, but if you can't say it confidently, then maybe smoking is not the issue here. Despite all the policies and the penalties you might come up with for managing your service staff, it require that you get out and use them. When you inform servers that there is a penalty for smoking, be it a write up or termination, you can not make it a threat, threats just hang in the air and get repeated over and over again at redundant employee meetings. Say it once, then do it once, and if it doesn't work, you need to be addressing bigger issues than server smoke breaks.