Get High Performing Employees!

While most employer realize that they need to train, supervisor, and support new employees in order to set them up for success, many employers fail to provide any adequate training. Why? The majority of them have the same old lame excuses:

• I’m too busy and don’t have time to train.
• It’s an easy job, they’ll get the hang of it soon enough.
• No one trained me and I did fine.

The truth is no matter how easy a job is and how experienced an employee might be, some form of training is necessary to ensure familiarity and consistence. You can’t expect to provide “quality” services and products if each employee does things a different way.


That’s like going to McDonalds, ordering 5 Big Macs and realizing that none of them look or taste the same, because 5 different employees made them. That’s NOT the way it’s supposed to work!

Each company has (or should have) its own standards operating procedures (SOP) and your employees need to know what they are and how to follow them.

There’s really no secret to getting high performing employees, but sometimes we tend to forget these things and need to be reminded.  In a nutshell here’s what you need to do as an employer to get the best out of your employees:

Hire the best!

Begin by recruiting and hiring the BEST people you can find for the job. Don’t fill the position with anyone that you can get cheap. Hire someone with a great SMILE who enjoys serving others and making people happy!  Hire for attitude and train for skills.

Train, train, train

If you have a job description and SOP for the position you are hiring for, use it! What’s the point of having a manual if you don’t use it? If you don’t have one, develop one.  Take some each day to document step-by-step how each task should be completed by an employee. If you need help with this check out,  Management of Food And Beverage Operations by Jack Ninemeier.

The book contains numerous job descriptions and sample task lists and job breakdowns that you can follow.

Don’t just pair up new employee with a seasoned employee and assume that they’ll receive proper train unless the seasoned employee is an official trainer and uses your SOP to train the new employee.

Tools of the trade

Once trained be sure that employees have adequate supplies. This changes from company to company, but whatever it is that your employees need, make sure they have it. It could be something as simple as writing pens, bottle openers, napkins, menus, or enough POS stations.  Whatever it is, it’s your responsibility to provide it to them. Employees want to do a good job and be recognized for it, but they can’t do their job if you don’t get them what they need. It’s like getting the fastest man on the planet, asking him to break the world record for the 100M sprint, but only giving him one shoe to wear.  He might cross the finish line, but I guarantee you he won’t be breaking any records or win any medals.

Recognize and Inspire

Once you've covered the items listed above you need to work on yourself and the job site.  Yes, I said that you need to work on yourself. Great employees will become demoralized, uninspired, and low performers if they have all of the above, but have a lousy boss.

Here are a few things that you need to do to become a better boss:

1. Coach without micromanaging
2. Provide constructive feedback to help improve performance
3. Inspire employees with your great work ethics and enthusiasm
4. Recognize and thank employees for the work they do.
5. Care about your employees
6. Don’t complain!
7. Smile! Don’t be an ogre! 

Job Site

The human mind is a lot more creative, inspired, and productive if the work place is clean and organized, so be sure to develop a system that keeps it that way. Cleaning and organizing should be a part of EVERYONE’s daily routine, whether you’re the business owner, manager, or employee everyone should be doing this. Develop a list of things that each employee should be responsible for maintaining during their shift and then a list of universal duties that need to be done everyone.

For example: a host or hostess should be specifically responsible for the entrance, hosting station, all of the menu, and buzzers if any, since it is directly related to their work, but they should also ensure that if they see anything dirty or out of place to clean it or return it to where it belongs.  If that’s not possible they need to get the person responsible for that particular area to handle it.