It’s all about the experience you create for your customers when they dine at your restaurant or taste your food. And when we say experience, we don’t mean the food solely. The experience you create involves the ambience, the customer service from the moment they enter the restaurant until they leave, and about the memories you create for them.

Therefore, you need to set processes that create consistency throughout the business to deliver the same experience.

Set your standards depending on the vision of your business, the restaurant’s style and your targeted customers then follow the standard processes that deliver consistency in quality.

How to reach this consistency?

With standard operating procedures or SOPs clearly written, you can achieve consistent service and processes to ensure success of your business.

What are the standard operating procedures?

Standard operating procedures are the documented and detailed procedures that describe daily tasks’ steps. They involve all possible tasks for each employee and position to achieve uniformity of the performance of the specific function. The more numerous the functions, the more SOPs you will have.

They serve as an available document that educates employees about their daily tasks in a standardized manner making knowledge of responsibilities and job roles and requirements available for everyone at anytime for execution.

Writing SOPs is time consuming at the beginning but once you have everything clearly set, training new employees or explaining their roles becomes way easier and passing the information to others become smoother and effortless.

Why do you need to write standard operating procedures?

Create consistency

No one can deliver the exact same task every time they perform it. Having detailed documents of each role is the way to create consistency regardless of who is performing the task.

Have you ever heard managers asking their staff to do things in a certain way or telling them that it’s not the proper way of doing it?

When you have the job role expectations set and documented, managers will no longer struggle to ask their employees to follow certain steps or to give them guidelines on how certain tasks should be done.

There are several methods to do the routine tasks. But you need your employees to follow the most efficient one and the one that aligns best with your goals according to what works best for your restaurant.

The task can be as simple as laying out tables for customers or placing cutleries (table layouts). The SOP depends on the type of your restaurant and how formal it is. In formal layouts such as in fine dining, clear instructions on how to place plates and cutleries should be written I addition to dessert tableware and even butter and bread with exact spacing measurements.

So, write a detailed SOP for this specific role for instance and document it so the service offered by all the waiters is consistent.

Simply, every single detail that needs to be done in a way that answers all possibilities should be documented.

Employee performance management

Once you have clear and detailed instructions and guidelines, you can easily monitor and track employees’ performance to see if they are following the rules or not. Evaluating them with the same criteria makes incentives’ decision clearer.

Reducing the time where you have to constantly give employees remarks on how things should be done and the steps to do it frees managers’ time to look thoroughly on testing new management models and enhancing performance through tracking mishaps.

Optimize customer’s experience

Offering a consistent service and experience to customers is crucial to retain them and optimize their satisfaction. Writing SOPs is the way to reach consistency among different operations and it helps you to unify roles’ execution whenever you have different employees performing the same tasks.

Even in recipes, you need consistency across different branches. Therefore, your POS software should have the recipe management feature that include all details of food preparation to be followed by different chefs.

Reduce labor cost

When you have your SOPs in place, training your employees will become easier and less time-consuming especially when you place your SOP to be the base for training new employees and cross-training.

If an employee calls in sick, you won‘t need to disrupt the service or go through cross-training employees to do the role. You can give the personnel replacing the absentee a quick run-through of the job’s SOP and they can start immediately.

The more you train your employees, the more growth opportunities you give them.

On the long run, you will notice that training new employees or cross-training is becoming more efficient, less time consuming and more systemized leading to increased labor retention.

Easily identify issues

Once everything is set, it becomes easy to detect issues in previously set processes that require attention and improvement.

Once you write the relevant SOP for a certain task that wasn't written before, you will clearly identify the mishaps of the current followed procedures and the way they are executed to improve performance and reach maximum efficiency.

You might think that writing SOPs is time consuming and it is at the beginning but once you have everything set and ready to use, you will save much time training your employees and identifying mistakes.