Successful restaurant owners have to maintain consistency and quality in a turbulent market where staff come and go and consumer tastes veer toward the latest food fashion. But it’s almost impossible to keep performance high unless you can accurately measure it. Fortunately, if you put your digital audit checklists in every employee’s hands, they’ll help collect crucial performance information every day – treasure you can mine for ongoing success.
Access Broader and More Accurate Data
Digital audit apps and checklists open the door to more detailed tracking information than ever before. Work activities are tagged according to the employee, the type of action, the time it was completed, and the location. Plus, the digital apps make it much harder for people to fake audits, so you have reliable records.
Although the amount of data stacks up, it’s easy to access because it’s pushed to the cloud and can be analyzed by location, region, job role, and topic, such as customer service or food quality. Altogether, the information provides a much more detailed picture of what your teams accomplish every day. And from that picture useful trends emerge.
Measure Time on Task to Increase Efficiency
Improved efficiency helps protect a restaurant’s bottom line, reduces the likelihood of mistakes when things get busy, and helps manage business growth. Digital checklists measure how much time employees spend accomplishing specific tasks. Restaurant managers can use that information to identify which tasks are taking too much time or even causing delays and find ways to streamline them.
Assess Quality Standards with Ongoing Measurements
Restaurants face operational challenges these days. Many are working with less staff. And many are still optimizing new services such as delivery or curbside pickup, which remain popular even as in-house dining returns to pre-pandemic levels. In the midst of these difficulties, customers demand a superb experience.
Owners can use audit data to track customer experience or any other quality standards. For example, customize audit applications to determine whether customers are greeted properly and thanked. Or check for timely service and proper food preparation.
With digital apps, any employee can take audits as often as desired and the data is compiled in the cloud so managers anywhere can determine if quality is holding steading, improving, or dropping. In the last case, the audit results pinpoint areas where quality is deficient, so managers can investigate and correct the problems.
Boost Training Results with Checklist Feedback
Restaurants sometimes experience high employee turnover and in today’s post-pandemic environment, many restaurants are fighting for workers. According to FSR Magazine, “In order to maximize operations and profits, operators will want to find ways to accelerate the learning curve for new recruits in order to push them beyond the ‘basics.’”
New hires need to onboard faster and grow into advanced skills quickly. Plus, many teams will benefit from cross-training so they can cover all responsibilities even if some colleagues are unexpectedly absent.
Checklists not only reinforce training; they also show managers whether the training was effective. If new employees have a harder time learning specific tasks, the training program may need to be revised. Trainers might spend more time on some tasks. Or leadership could augment daily checklists with additional instructions and videos as reminders. The checklist feedback becomes an improvement cycle for refining training and keeping team productivity high.
Improve Overall Performance with Comparative Data
Some locations may struggle to meet standards regularly. Use digital audit data to highlight stores that need help by comparing locations to each other. The data will show managers where and how to focus their efforts in coaching and training to ensure every link in the chain is as strong as every other.
Maintain Audit-Ready Temperature Logs
With digital audit apps, employees can track temperatures in food storage manually or automatically via Bluetooth-enabled sensors. The information is pushed instantly to the cloud where it’s stored long term. If the restaurant goes through a regulatory audit, it’s a snap to provide reports. Plus, regular temperature monitoring helps you find and fix any glitchy equipment before it causes problems.
Prime New Locations for Success
As your business grows, you’ll launch additional locations. Once you’ve made the investment, the new crew needs to be operating on all cylinders quickly. You have strong procedures in place from other establishments, and checklists will help bring the latest group up to speed.
Plus, with the data collected from other locations, you can set performance benchmarks which let you know when the recently opened restaurant is meeting standards. If the team lags behind, managers can easily see what tasks they struggle with and help them move on to profitability.
Correlate Data for More Detailed Insights
Most restaurants collect business data from POS systems as well. Correlate this information with your checklist and audit results for a clearer picture of how employee actions impact revenue.
For example, if you’re running a promotion for seasonal menu items, customize checklists to ensure staff are bringing the items to customers’ attention then measure how many diners order them. If you’re getting the results you want, you have a recipe for future promotional success. If not, you can tweak the offer or staff actions and re-measure.
Easily Capture Essential Data with MeazureUp
MeazureUp is designed to make data collection and analysis simple, so you can capture business insights and act on them quickly.
- Collect data from every employee at no extra cost with the unlimited user business model.
- Easily customize checklists to measure what’s important to your business.
- Streamline procedures by tracking time-on-task.
- Build standardized quality assessments to ensure brand consistency.
- Capture food storage temperatures with Bluetooth sensor integration.
- Ensure reliable information with location, time stamps, and photos for accountability.
- Measure training effectiveness for improved employee productivity.
- View trends in graphs so you easily understand what the data is telling you.
- Set benchmarks and rank locations according to your standards.
Click here to learn more about how MeazureUp data helps you grow and expand your restaurants.
