The 10-Minute Manager's Guide To Effective Staff Meetings

By Virginia Gerst, Special to R&I -- Restaurants & Institutions, 9/1/2004

employee meetings are as important to a foodservice operation as the fire on the grill and the salt in the shakers. They’re a place to share information, sharpen skills and build staff enthusiasm.

“Communication is key to a healthy culture, and that is what these meetings are all about,” says Tom Miner, a principal at Technomic Inc., a Chicago-based food and restaurant consulting firm. Effective meetings don’t just happen. They call for careful planning and creative thinking. Go on too long and employees’ eyes glaze over. Rush the process and people leave unsatisfied. “The meeting is not just about management telling people what to do. It’s also about hearing employee concerns,” says Miner.

Before Meal Meetings

Daily pre-meal meetings are on the menu for foodservice employees at The Rockefeller University in New York City.

“They are like a religion, like saying mass,” says Thierry Pradines, director of foodservice for New York City-based contractor Restaurant Associates at The Rockefeller University.

Eleven Madison Park

At pre-meal meetings, held for 10 to 20 minutes before serving begins, cafeteria and private-dining managers describe new recipes, report on customer feedback, and supervise a give-and-take discussion of subjects ranging from scheduling to locker facilities.

In the cafeteria, the meetings also include a “show and tell,” as the person in charge of each food station describes what is being served that day and recounts what sold well—or failed to sell—the previous day. “It’s not like we’re selling a car, where every day the product is the same,” says Pradines. “We change our menu so much, we need to update the staff. They need to know what we are selling.”

Meetings must end when the cafeteria opens at 11:30 a.m., but that does not mean an end to productive exchanges. “If you feel there is an interesting discussion going on and it is positive for the staff, we continue it tomorrow,” says Pradines.

Technomic’s Miner also emphasizes the need for pre-meal meetings for both front- and back-of-the-house personnel. “They should be a daily occurrence,” he says. “There’s a lot to talk about.”

Topics in the dining room should center on customer service, touching on such subjects as timing (has food been coming from the kitchen promptly?), sagging wine sales, and dress-code standards (what about those servers’ dirty shoes?).

In the kitchen, the concern is operational issues. “It’s about the product,” says Miner. “It’s about how to be more efficient and how to maintain quality and standards.”

In both cases, pre-meal meetings allow management and staff to come to a consensus about goals and how to achieve them.

“You need to work with individuals too,” says Miner. “But if you can reinforce your goals as a group, it is more productive.”

Give and Take

Effective meetings are not one-way streets. Good managers encourage feedback from the entire employee group.

Eleven Madison Park

Gary Levine, vice president of food and beverage for Quorum Hotels and Resorts, operators of The Brown Palace Hotel in Denver, provides time for questions and comments at every meeting with the foodservice staff. “Enhancing communication is the most important part of the meeting,” he says. “We try not to tell people what to do. We try to ask them for their suggestions. It’s too boring if we just lecture them, and they come up with some great ideas.”

Management at New York City-based Union Square Hospitality Group does not just ask for suggestions, it demands them. A facilitator at each monthly management meeting is charged with eliciting opinions from all members of the group, whether they volunteer to speak up or not. “We’ll pose a question like ‘What’s the answer to making Saturday less chaotic?’ and the facilitator will call on people to answer,” says Richard Coraine, director of operations.

Comments also are encouraged during the family meals, held 30 minutes before each shift, and at monthly focus groups conducted by the director of human resources and open to anyone who wants to attend. “It’s a general listening session,” says Coraine. “The comments are written down and given to people in charge of the restaurants. Information flows both up and down in our company.”

Staying in Focus

Lockkeepers

Meetings are a learning experience at Lockkeepers, a 175-seat fine-dining restaurant in Valley View, Ohio, just outside of Cleveland.

Management schedules daily 10- to 20-minute meetings before all shifts and spends a portion of the time focusing on food and wine service skills it believes need improvement. Recent topics have included the procedure for refilling water glasses and lessons in folding napkins. The manager on duty conducts the sessions, aided by the chef and sommelier.

A single-focus topic is repeated for an entire week and past subjects are reviewed. All servers and bartenders are required to attend.

“Each week, we add a new step so that we get better and better,” says Assistant Manager Amanda Walcher.

Set an Agenda

When it comes to meetings, winging it is for the birds.

“I have an agenda and I stick to it,” says Gary Levine (r.) of The Brown Palace Hotel.

Levine meets with Brown Palace food and beverage directors weekly, and with staff from each department at least once a month. Sessions run no longer than one hour because “everybody’s busy, and if you go on too long, you lose their attention.

“We prepare an agenda in advance and try to hit the points that are most important,” Levine says. “If you give people too many issues to deal with, they will nod their head and agree with you, but they won’t remember things.”

Agendas also are in order at restaurants in the Union Square Hospitality Group, which includes Union Square Cafe, Gramercy Tavern, Eleven Madison Park, Table and Blue Smoke. At each of the restaurants, the person deemed most organized—from chef to day manager—is appointed to keep the agenda at weekly management meetings. Minutes are taken and distributed to all participants via e-mail.

Managers are not required to attend meetings that are held on their days off, but they are expected to read the minutes. “They can’t say, ‘No, I wasn’t at the meeting, and I don’t know,’” explains Coraine.