Monitoring your employee performance has never been the most desirable task that a restaurant manager would like to do especially with the other struggles they usually go through.

Keeping your employees motivated and engaged is also one of the most critical tasks within any restaurant. You have to balance employee’s rights with his performance and always find a way to encourage them while providing a healthy and desirable work environment.

Employee turnover rate in restaurant sector and hospitality in general is an issue by itself especially after the 2020 restaurant struggles during Covid19.

During 2021, the hospitality sector employee turnover rate reached around 130%.

While some restaurant owners accepted the fact of high employee turnover rate at restaurants as a part of their business, others still struggle to find solutions and decrease this rate.

Many factors affect employee retention and the pay and the benefits are the most obvious ones to keep the employee interested but they’re not the only issues to consider. For you to find a suitable retention structure for your restaurant, you need to perform employee evaluation regularly.

What is employee evaluation?

Employee evaluation is an important and a very effective communication tool between managers and employees and it creates an opportunity for career growth and goals setting.

It’s a periodic performance review performed regularly usually quarterly that enables you to give your employees feedback about their performance, your expectations from them while sharing with you their daily challenges.

How to perform an employee evaluation?

Set clear expectations

Your employees should have a clear understanding of their job responsibilities so they can perform accordingly. Employee evaluation cannot be fair if employees don’t have a clear job description that includes all their tasks clearly.

Setting clear goals and expectations puts everything on track especially during the employee evaluation.

Perform them regularly

Employee evaluation is not a response to an alarming employee performance or during underperformance. The evaluations should have a regular schedule performed either monthly or ideally quarterly.

The evaluations should include all employees regardless or their performance so you can direct underperformers and show appreciation for overachievers.

Plan for the meeting

Take employee performance evaluation meetings seriously. Check employee reports generated from the POS system to write down points about each employee. Quantitative data is essential to clarify your employees’ weaknesses and strengths.

Do not solely talk about recent incidents, rather focus on the overall behavior and performance. Provide them with negative as well as positive feedback.

Prior to the meeting, identify areas of improvements and the tools to achieve a better performance in specific points.

Employees should be prepared for the meeting as well so inform them ahead of time.

Let the employee do a self-evaluation

Your evaluation is important but seeing how employees evaluate themselves is equally important because it exhibits the way they see their performance versus the goals they have set for themselves.

You can identify the resource of certain underperformance from this self-evaluation.

When evaluating themselves, give them specific questions and answers that they can answer objectively. Always provide them with a clear performance requirement so they can easily do the evaluation.

Write down an action plan and growth area

Once the evaluation is performed, growth areas and an action plan should be set for a specific period.

Without an action plan that can be measured, the performance evaluation is useless. After identifying the weaknesses and strengths, set a clear working plan for the coming month or quarter.

Act upon the evaluation

The purpose of this employee performance evaluation is to strengthen your team and improve the overall performance. Praise employees that are overachievers and hold underperformers accountable when needed.

The key to your success lies within your restaurant and especially your team. Therefore, build a strong team that is passionate about his work and committed to your restaurant with a positive attitude and a healthy and welcoming environment.