Back To Basics - Five Ways To Brighten Up Your Briefings
TLDR
A good briefing will,
📌 build knowledge, and improve engagement and job satisfaction
📌 create happier guests through an improved, more consistent experience
📌 drive financial performance through higher spend per head and repeat visits
📌 help teams identify and solve problems themselves
📌 build confidence for quieter, less experienced members of your team
Still with me?
It’s in the bars and dining rooms of our businesses where brands are really built. With the guest experience playing the defining role.
Through my operations career to my early freelance days, to latterly building brands from the ground up, I’ve always loved pre-shift briefings. A chance to listen, learn, and iterate based on the previous day's feedback and observations.
It always surprises me that many restaurants don't seem to bother with them now. Or use them as purely functional opportunities for one way, instructive communication.
When done properly, pre-shift briefings can act as a key conduit between senior management and front-line teams. An opportunity to reinforce your brand’s strategy and cultural framework in a relatable and actionable way.
Why bother?
I believe that a brand is built on four things - founder vision, strategy, culture and operations.
These culminate in two things - your customer experience, and your employee experience.
A quality briefing is the intersection of all of this.
As a founder, what are your current focus areas and priorities? How have these informed your current strategy and how does this relate to what goes on during service?
What are the current cultural challenges and opportunities? What operational improvements or changes are needed to achieve or remedy all this?
Getting your team together for fifteen to twenty minutes twice a day can reap huge rewards if the sessions are structured in the correct way.
1 - Use your values to improve service
Ask one member of the team to volunteer an issue or mistake that has occurred recently. And then ask the group to use your values to frame a solution - the how, the what and the why.
Your manager shouldn’t be tempted to jump in. Let the team work through this but give them a time limit so things don’t drag on, and so they get used to identifying and solving problems quickly by themselves.
2 - Pick a pain point
You’ll have frustrations and so will your managers. So in addition to allowing the team to identify and solve their own problems, throw one of your own in the mix.
This could be anything from cleanliness, speed of resetting tables, to smooth arrival and hosting experience.
Be clear on what the expectation is, ask the team why this is currently not being delivered to the required standard, and then have them work towards a solution. Again, using your company’s values to guide the process.
3 - Incentivise learning
Select a dish, cocktail and wine that the team can taste. These could be things that need selling, new ones that need crucial customer feedback, or just items you’re really loving right now and are proud to have on the menu.
But the outcome is the same regardless: you want your team to know all about everything they’re selling. And how to get your guests to buy them.
Have the team discuss them. And together, agree on the story or description that will make them irresistible to guests.
Then, incentivise the team to go and sell them. Rewarding whomever sells the most with something that’s going to make them happy.
4 - Quick fire knowledge sharing
Every member of your team has something to offer the others. So have everyone share one piece of knowledge each day.
This could be a little quirk of a wine on the list, something they’ve learned about the producer of an ingredient of a dish, or a little trick they use during service to sell products or improve the guest experience.
5 - Focus on the quiet folk
Experience has taught me that it’s not only the loudest voices that have something to say. So always make an effort to engage the quieter, shyer members of your teams. Give them the space to participate.
Colleagues will learn from their knowledge, and they’ll improve their confidence levels, too.
If you and your team take the time to do this each day, I guarantee they’ll be happier, more engaged and more knowledgeable because of it.
This means your guests will have a better experience, too. Leading to repeat custom, advocation and word-of-mouth marketing.
And if you’d like a template briefing sheet, developed over the last seven years of building brand experiences, then contact me and I’d be delighted to share it with you.
Do you want to learn more about how I help companies to launch and scale hospitality brands from the inside? Or do you have a project or collaboration you’d like to discuss?
