By Theresa Bontempo
Let’s face it, the back-of-house (BOH) employees of your business are foundational to your success. They play a major role in customer satisfaction, service quality and the flow of operations.
With so much dependence on the success of your BOH employees, it’s critical to provide them with adequate support. Employee engagement plays a crucial role in cultivating that support, and it’s important at all stages of an employee’s time with you. After all, they’re a large part of the success of your business, so you should definitely make the effort to ensure they feel recognized and engaged.
In this article we’ll discuss that and more including:
- Why BOH employees are crucial for a business’s success
- What employee engagement is
- Tips to keep your BOH employees involved
- Strategies you can try to day to boost employee engagement
What BOH Employees Really Do and Why They’re So Important
BOH employees may not be up front handling customer interactions, but they are doing wonders behind the scenes!
BOH employees do many important tasks that customers and other staff members don’t see, but their hard work shouldn’t go unnoticed. Image courtesy of Sling.
In many deskless industries, customers and staff members are often interacting with each other, promoting different deals and sales going on, or prepping for a long day of serving your community. From chefs, line cooks, prep cooks, dishwashers, expediters, housekeepers, and even managers, BOH employees are crucial for the success of many businesses where engagement with them is crucial.
BOH Employees: The Backbone of Restaurants and Hospitality Businesses
When we think of how a restaurant runs, there are the hostesses that sit you at your table and then the servers who take your order, serve you your food, and give you the check. It’s easy to not even think about the people who are making your order since it’s all done in the kitchen where you can’t see–but their role in successfully making and delivering it to you is just as important.
BOH employees may work behind-the-scenes, but their job is some of the most important. Without BOH employees, many restaurants and hospitality businesses would utterly fail, especially since they do many different jobs that chefs, servers, hostesses, and managers simply can’t do with everything else going on.
Here is a comprehensive list of some of the most crucial BOH job positions in both the restaurant and hospitality industries:
- Chefs (executive, head, and sous)
- Line cooks
- Prep cooks
- Dishwashers
- Busser
- Expeditors
- BOH managers
- Housekeeping
- Maintenance
- Marketing teams
- Finance teams
Why is Retaining BOH Staff So Important?
There are a number of reasons why BOH staff is important to have, engage with, and also to train properly. Since BOH staff are essentially what keeps many restaurants and hotels running smoothly, it’s important to understand many of their key responsibilities in the positions that they hold.
For restaurants, food safety and compliance is crucial and it’s something that BOH staff follow and check for every meal on every shift. From checking the food quality and safety, making sure that raw meats and fish are cooked thoroughly, it in return makes customers satisfied with their purchase and wanting to come back even if they don’t get to see the kitchen.
Also doing simple tasks such as being able to check inventory and stock supplies, prep ingredients for a busy dinner rush, and even help to reduce waste, BOH staff are crucial to everyday operations of any business, keeps standards high, and adds passion to their line of work and wanting every customer’s experience to be the best it can possibly be.
What is Employee Engagement? An Essential Guide to How These Software Systems Are Life-Changing in the Workplace
Employee engagement systems are a great way to engage staff and boost productivity–which eventually leads to higher company profit!
Your back of house employees should get the recognition they deserve when they put in the time and the hard work by showcasing it through digital signage.
Employee engagement is all about how connected employees are to your business, their fellow employees and the work they do. It is based on the employee’s perception of various elements of their workplace and how it affects them. It should be noted that employee engagement is not the same thing as job satisfaction, employee well-being, or even employee happiness. Those all may become part of engagement in some form, but they are distinct and different from each other.
Why Employee Engagement Matters
It’s crucial for staff to be happy within their position and to receive and give feedback as a manager and from employees too. It’s important for your staff to be connected and passionate about your business’s mission, and their engagement can make all the difference.
Here are a few reasons why upping employee engagement matters and the factors that it comes down to when looking to improve upon it in the workplace:
- Job satisfaction. This refers to the emotional response of employees to performing their daily work, and how they feel about actually being present at the job site.
- Employee well-being. The employee’s state of well-being isn’t just defined by their job satisfaction, but also their workload, stress levels, and their work/life balance.
- Employee happiness. Happier employees are more productive, as they take pride in their work because they feel their work is recognized and they are rewarded in positive ways. Having a positive attitude about their role in the job can significantly increase their happiness.
Why Should Businesses Care About Employee Engagement?
Employee engagement has a direct impact on several different aspects of employee-employer relationships, both in potentially positive and negative ways. An employee who has positive engagement with their workplace feels fulfilled and invested in their role. They ‘love their job.’ They find enjoyment, fulfillment and even pleasant challenges in their work.
Positively engaged employees have a high retention rate, tend to work harder and are more efficient and willing to contribute to the overall well-being of the company. Negatively engaged–or ‘disengaged’–employees, on the other hand, are employees who harbor negative feelings or emotions about their role or work environment. Unlike a positively engaged employee that tends to be a cheerful, harder worker, a disengaged employee is often apathetic and inefficient.
Employee engagement, positive or negative, is a factor in your business whether or not you take an active role in cultivating it. So let’s take a look at some ways you can go about fostering positive engagement with your BOH employees and make your business more effective along the way.
Employee Engagement Strategies to Engage your BOH Ship With
Try out some of these tips and tricks to see how it positively increases engagement in your staff!
Spending time on employee engagement is a great way to improve employee satisfaction.
Employee engagement systems can make all the difference when it comes to your BOH team. Even though they may be behind-the-scenes when working their magic at crafting new delicious meals for patrons to try, or are there to clean and food prep, a BOH team is crucial for the success of many businesses in the hospitality and restaurant industries where an employee engagement system can boost their confidence and engagement.
Learn How Your Team is Motivated
You’re not going to be able to engage your BOH team effectively unless you know what motivates them. You can find this out by trying different strategies and analyzing the results. Employee surveys are a highly effective way to gain insight into how your employees feel and what you can do to support them.
Some of the top ways to find out what motivates BOH employees include:
- Online surveys
- Understand demotivating factors
- Track incentive programs
- Suggestion box
Of course, sharing surveys is useless if they aren’t used, so it’s important to be creative about how you deliver them.
One approach businesses are taking comes in the form of online surveys, which can be easily distributed via QR codes embedded in digital signage and displays in your BOH environment. Shift allows you to easily set up QR codes and landing pages for your employees to access with their mobile devices at their convenience.
This makes it easy to identify pain points in your employees’ experiences, gaps in their knowledge and moves you one step closer to providing BOH staff with the support they need. It demonstrates you’re as invested in their success as you want them to be in their work!
Set a Common Goal to Achieve
Your employees may assume some of your business's abstract goals–make more this month than last month, increase customer flow, etc. But ultimately, setting concrete, measurable and specific performance goals for all your BOH employees to work towards can dramatically improve employee engagement. Making the goals clear for the next week, month, or quarter is a great way to ensure that they understand the long term goals, as well as the short term goals they can make a positive impact on daily.
Possible common goals may include but are not limited to setting monthly sales goals, signing up new Rewards program customers or even creating a target sales number for limited or promotional items.
One resource you may consider to help you meet these performance goals is Shift, a digital signage software solution that is tailored specifically for deskless environments and BOH staff.
Shift allows you to display key performance indicators and company-wide goals, as well as streamline training processes. When employees have clear directions and performance standards to follow, it makes it easy for them to excel at their work. This can alleviate the pressure new employees feel during onboarding and can significantly reduce employee turnover rates.
Add a Little Friendly Competition
While striving towards a common goal can be quite motivating for many employees, some employees in your workforce may find a little healthy competition to be a tremendous motivator.
Lots of people are naturally competitive, and friendly competition can help engage those tendencies and draw out their best efforts. It can also foster an environment that encourages employees to take on more responsibility while rewarding ambition.
Shift is the perfect tool for this. It makes it easy to display progress and performance metrics that keep employees accountable while celebrating growth. Shift can easily track and share this information because it pulls information from your business’s point-of-sale system. Seeing who met the goals for the week (or month) is a great motivating factor to continue to strive for better. It also gives them the recognition they deserve, and gives their co-workers something to aim for as well.
Motivating your employees with concrete goals has never been easier!
Recognize Hard Work When You See It
Employee recognition goes a long way! Letting BOH staff know that their efforts are appreciated and seen is an easy way to boost employee engagement.
You can easily design and display celebrations of employee success with Shift’s Canva integration. With hundreds of free templates to choose from, you can make your screens the centerpiece of employee engagement.
Shift makes it easy to customize displays with photos and bios of your employees, sharing POS sales metrics and highlighting their best qualities. You can even create robust recognition campaigns that allow staff members to share shoutouts that can be displayed on screen, too.
Cultivating an environment of support and recognition is a crucial part of developing strong employee engagement strategies. When hard work and good results are called out, it contributes to a more positive environment overall. Back of the house employees see that management really is making the effort to stay engaged, and will want to continue to put their best work forward. A happier environment also can foster a safe place where employees feel like they can bring questions, suggestions, or concerns to the management without fear of reprisals or rejections.
Make Employee Learning an Ongoing Practice
Keeping your employees up to date on policies and procedures can be a challenge, and a lack of awareness can disconnect employees from their work and make it difficult to perform.
Shift makes it easy for you to ensure that your employees have the resources they need without having to run multiple meetings a week. It’s an easy way to ensure that employees who have different learning styles are still able to retain information and stay engaged in their work. No one wants to feel like they’ve plateaued and there’s nothing new to learn. This can lead to boredom and disengagement. Offer growth opportunities, or ways to learn new skills or tasks to add to their tool belt. When employees are given the chance to keep learning, they’ll be more satisfied with their job and come to work with a positive attitude.
You can incorporate live polls and trivia games to make learning exciting, too! Shift is the platform for your BOH employee engagement strategies as well as the premiere digital signage software solution for engaging with your employees and keeping them invested in their work.
Shift includes a variety of features that make it easy to create and display employee engagement content in just minutes, and they are integrated in commonly used BOH and POS platforms such as Xenial, BrinkPOS and Aloha. Best of all, you’ll be able to track and measure results almost instantly! With real-time analytics, QR code integration and mobile-friendly landing pages, you can easily find out what your employees find most engaging. Automated scheduling makes keeping employees engaged easy, without the need for meetings that may not be effective.
Up Your Employee Engagement for Your BOH Staff For a Better, Stronger Team
Employee engagement is crucial for the success of any business–especially BOH staff working where customers don’t normally see them. Making sure that these staff members are engaged and recognizing them for all of the work that they do before a busy lunch or dinner rush, or even to prep a room before new guests check in, BOH staff are crucial to retain and take care of in the hospitality industry.
Ready to make your staff more engaged in their work? Try a demo of Shift today to see what we can do for your business.
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