The Expectation Gap

Three submissions, same pattern: operators with clear standards that never made it out of their heads. We talk about inconsistent execution that isn't a people problem, training that's really just shadowing, and accountability conversations that don't stick. The gap between what you expect and what you've built to make it achievable.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Every restaurant has a suggestion box collecting dust somewhere near the host stand. This show is a different kind. Operators send in their real challenges, staffing, costs, culture, systems, anonymously, and we talk through them on air. If you've ever felt like your operation is running you instead of the other way around, you're in the right place. I'm Ryan Hornebrook, founder of Elevated Restaurant Solutions, and this is the suggestion box. Welcome back to episode six of the suggestion box, where real owners, real operators, and real industry pros send in their real challenges and we talk about it in real time. My name is Ryan Hornebrook, uh founder of Elevated Restaurant Solutions, where we help independent restaurant owners and operators lower their costs without lowering their standards. Excuse my voice this week. The weather is turning here in the Northeast of the United States, so my allergies are also turning. Um I will be as respectful as I can with any throat clearing, but uh dealing with a little bit of the elements. Uh last week we talked about what's happening outside of your restaurant. We talked about um guests kind of creating the own their own experience um uh before they even entered your building, through social media, through reviews online, through their own networks and talking to them uh and putting together kind of what the experience would be before they even walk through your doors. This week we're gonna talk a little bit about um expectations, specifically the gap between what an owner or an operator expects their team to do and what they've actually given their team to work with. A lot of people have standards. Um, I have standards, you have standards. Everybody in their head understands what good looks like to them. They know what they want. And the um those standards live in their head and nowhere else. It's not documented for anybody to see, to replicate, to hold anybody accountable, themselves or somebody else. So you can't hold people accountable to a standard that they've never been given. And we're gonna listen to some of the submissions and talk through some of these situations. Um, real quickly before we do, though, uh, thank you again to everybody that continues to send stuff in. Uh, without the submissions, this does not continue. So I truly do appreciate that. And if you are experiencing a challenge that you're dealing with that you would just like some insight on or that you can't figure out, it's nagging, you don't have time to get to it, and you just want to get somebody else's perspective, I would invite you to send it in to the suggestion box at elevatedrestaurant solutions.com. Um it's anonymous. So if you feel inclined, go ahead and send that in. We would be more than happy to uh invite your situation onto the suggestion box so we could talk things through. Uh we'll start today with the submission. Uh

Preferences Aren't Standards

SPEAKER_00 3:30

reads, I feel like I'm constantly correcting the same things. My team isn't bad. They work hard, they care, but the execution is inconsistent. One server does things one way, another does it completely different. The kitchen runs clean on some shifts and sloppy on others. I know what I want, but I can't seem to get the whole team to deliver in consistency. I'm sorry, to deliver it consistently. I've talked about it in pre-shifts, but nothing sticks. What am I missing? Um completely draining this whole situation. I've been involved in it. Uh, I'm sure every operator has been involved with it sometime somewhere. Um, every staff member has probably been involved with it sometime somewhere. Um the frustration of correcting the same things over and over and over and over and over again, it completely wears down. So I whenever I would get to the point of I felt like I was it was groundhog day. It's just groundhog day. The definition of insanity, we all know it, we all talk about it. Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. I would get to the point where I had to think differently. And I was like, okay, well, if nobody's gonna listen to me, I'm gonna write it down, and you can't deny something that's physically written right in front of your face. You can't deny it. There is no excuse, there's nothing. Um the fact that you have a hardworking and caring team makes it a little confusing because usually buy-in is is part of the reason that nothing is sticking. Your team's not bought in enough to hold that same standard or those same standards that you want. And when you talk about it in pre-shift, it's not pre-shift alone is not a system. Um, it's something that happens every day. I mean, there pre-shift is very good for a lot of things, but it's not a system for holding standards, um, holding people accountable because it's you're doing a lot of talking. Uh, and and what we're the solution here is documentation. Um reminders during a pre-shift don't replace that documentation. So the standards do exist. Let's acknowledge that. You have standards. There is there is a a bar that needs to be held, but it's in your head. It hasn't been transferred into anything that the team can reference, repeat, or measure against. Like they can't look at their phone if the document lives on, you know, a seven shifts or something like that, or a Google Drive, or anything, anywhere. There's no reference point for somebody to look and check back and say, okay, is this the stand? Am I holding this to the standard that that is desired? The inconsistency is almost always gonna be because there is not that system, there's not that documentation. Has nothing to do with the people that work there. The people are not the problem. If two servers are doing the same thing two different ways, then it's it shouldn't be why is one of them doing it right and why is one of them doing it wrong. It's why is there even a situation that there's not a document or something living written down that can hold the other one accountable and say, no, that's wrong. It's clearly written right here. You signed it when you when you onboarded. And the verbal standards decay. So you can say something one day, and 30 days from now, 30 days is a lot, 14 days from now, that standard could be completely rewritten, depending on who's working, depending on who decided to hold it or who decided to alter it, etc. I was just talking about this with someone, and I posted it on LinkedIn. The game Whisper Down the Lane, we've all played it at some point or another, whether it was a camp or an icebreaker conversation at an expo or school, or you know, some point in your life, Whisper Down the Lane was either played or brought up. We all understand what it is. Um, I was working with a kitchen that had no build book. So recipes were all over the place, depending on who was working. There was no standard. And I wanted to make the point, so I wanted to play the game Whisper Down the Lane. Of course, I got some you know, eye rolls. They thought it was corny, but I really wanted to implement the understanding of why a build book was necessary because I didn't want them to build a build book because I said, hey, we should have a build book, and then it gets placed on the top shelf, collects dust and grease, and and ten years later they're like, Oh my god, remember we did this? I wanted them to understand why it was important to have them. So, whispered down the lane on a little whiteboard, I had written theoretical at the top, and then the statement was a proper copper coffee pot puts a pretty smile on people's pouty faces, and then I held that tight to my chest. So now theoretically, that sentence should come back to me and it'd be the same thing. So there were about twelve staff members with us that day, and I tell the kitchen manager, to my right, this sentence. Now he passes it along, the next person passes it along, the next person passes it along, the next person passes it along. When it comes back to me, the sentence was a pretty copper coffee pot puts a smile on pouty faces. Which is not bad. I mean, that's pretty close to what I had. There were a few words swapped here and there. Nothing crazy, right? So in that one scenario, sure. Couple words missing, nobody cares. Everything's still pretty much the same. Nobody's gonna complain. But when you do that same sentence 20 times a day, 40 times a day, whatever the product mix is, 365 days a year, because there's nobody holding accountable that sentence to make sure it's being stated properly, thousands of words are misplaced. Thousands. So it wasn't just a corny exercise, it was an exercise to show that those little small mistakes, small differences, they compound over time. Because if it's not written down, it doesn't exist as a standard, it exists as a preference, depending on who's working. But preferences are optional, you know? Maybe they do, maybe they don't. And who's gonna be there to hold them accountable if they have nothing to reference uh that's written down in concrete? So I would pick three to five things that matter the most to the guest experience, and I would write them down explicitly, not in a policy manual. I'm not saying, you know, create this big, large document. Uh, it just needs to be a one-pager that says this is how we do this here. And that can be duplicated and replicated and referenced if it needs to be. And don't make it some generic, general, like greet guests warmly standard. Because anybody can say that, but that's not specific enough to hold somebody accountable. You need to say, like, acknowledge every table within 60 seconds of being seated by name if you know them. That's something that you can go back and say you can measure that, you can measure the progress of that. Um, audit your service for sure. Walk walk the floor during the service. Look for those gaps between that written standard that you have and what's actually happening, because then you have a baseline, you have a starting point, and you could coach to the standard and not to your frustration in the moment when it's happening. The pre-shift is still valuable. I'm I still use a pre-shift, still do the pre-shift. I'm huge on pre-shifts. I think they're wildly underrated and underutilized. But I would use it to reinforce that written standard, not replace it. So say tonight we're focusing on table acknowledgement times. And that lands harder when you point to the document that states that standard that you now have. Because they're looking at it and they're saying, Oh, okay, all right. This this is the standard. I see it, it's right in front of me. And if I have a question, I know I can go look at it. So if the standard only lives in your head, then everyone else around you is guessing. And guessing produces exactly the inconsistency that you're experiencing on a daily basis. So I would start there for sure. All right, submission number two

'Watch Me' Isn't a Training Program

SPEAKER_00 13:40

says when I hire someone, I have them shadow one of my experienced staff for a few shifts, and then they're on their own. It works most of the time, but occasionally someone comes out the other end who clearly didn't absorb what they were supposed to. I don't have a formal training program, and I'm not sure I need one. My staff is kind of small and things move fast. Is there a middle ground between no training and building a whole program? There's this is probably how most people do it, honestly, um in terms of independent restaurants, mom and pop shops, that sort of thing. Um it's not wrong in principle, it's just incomplete when you try and execute it. Because it works most of the time because that's how everyone's done it forever, and it's just like, oh yeah, well, that's how that's how training is. But that's an excuse now, and it doesn't work anymore. Because when you say most of the time, that means that there are some times that it doesn't work, and that's not okay. That is inconsistent. So, yes, there's a middle ground. We can absolutely find the middle ground between building an entire program from the ground up and having no training at all. We we can find some balance there. The shadowing aspect of all of this, a lot of people were trained like this, myself included, uh 20 years ago, but shadowing transfers behavior. You're watching somebody do something, it doesn't transfer understanding. There is no explanation of why they're doing that thing. So, a new hire who shadows a great employee, they learn what that employee's doing, but not necessarily why they're doing it. And why is what they need when something unexpected happens on their first solo shift. Because why we do it creates consistency over and over and over again because there's a goal. When you're watching somebody do something, if there's no goal, you're questioning why they're doing it, and then it becomes kind of just lost in the wind. Um, the other problem with this, the quality of the shadowing depends entirely on who they're shadowing. If that person, you know, had a bad day, or if that person was going through something, or maybe just wasn't feeling it, that's that's a situational shadow. It's gonna it's gonna reflect in their performance when they when they start. They might not even stick around. I've seen people completely walk out before their training's done because they're just not receiving the proper training that it takes to retain staff and talent. And if their shadower maybe has some shortcuts that they've developed, those shortcuts now get transferred on to the next person. And at that point, you're not training to your standard that you have written down, you're training to whoever happened to be available to shadow that week. And there's no verification to confirm that they actually absorbed what they're supposed to before they get cut loose. So then there's no audit of whether they have what it takes to make sure that the standards that you do have are held accountable. And who's watching that? You know, if the shadowing was loose and lenient, it's not like the staff is gonna hold them accountable. And it sounds like you're not roaming the floor making sure that everybody's holding that standard. So the middle ground, I think, that we're talking about is a training checklist, not a training program. So it's a one-page document. You're gonna list all the specific things that a new hire needs to demonstrate that they're considered ready with a sign offline for whoever trained them throughout that week. It's gonna take about an hour to build, but it's gonna immediately transform shadowing from a passive observation from whoever is working with them into structured progression. The trainer knows what they need to cover because it's on the list, and the trainee knows what they're being evaluated on. So they're conscious of all of their decisions and what they should be doing, and they can ask questions along the way and reference it to the list. Also, I would definitely, I don't know if you're doing this now, add a 30-day check-in. I talk about this all the time with one on one-on-ones. One-on-ones literally give you everything you need to know about your business. Any any question that you you have, the staff is gonna know or the guest is gonna know. That's your business model, it's what keeps you open. Ask those two anything. So add a 30-day check-in for any trainee that is not a performance review, we're not judging how they're doing, but just a conversation where you ask three questions, and that's what's going well, what is still unclear, and what do you need. A lot of new hires fail because nobody asked them those questions until it was too late. Like I said, some people I've witnessed people leave training prior to seven days because they recognized very quickly that they were just thrown with somebody that was considered, you know, a top employee, but maybe didn't even necessarily want to train, and it just did not feel right. And nobody has time for that, especially not today. You need to be intentional about who you're putting new hires with. I just mentioned, you know, maybe they didn't want to train. Your best trainer is not necessarily your best performer. So have conversations with people. There might be people that aren't necessarily the best in terms of volume or in terms of skill or uh in terms of you know personality, charisma, but they might hold the standards the way that you want them held. So that would be a really good person to train on the standards that you're looking for. Because at the end of the day, we're we're not trying to build a program. We we talked about it. It's it's a very simple list that you just need to give somebody to know what they're training, someone on, and for the trainee to understand what they're being evaluated on. Shadowing is an input, it's not an outcome. The checklist is gonna turn things around for you.

Follow-Through Is the Work

SPEAKER_00 21:10

All right. The last submission of the day reads, I'm not afraid to have hard conversations with my staff. If someone's not performing, I tell them directly, but the conversations don't seem to stick. Things improve for a week or two and then slide back. I end up having the same conversations again two months later. It's exhausting, and I'm starting to feel like nothing actually changes. Am I doing something wrong, or is this just how it goes? Well, okay, first, at least you're willing to have a conversation. That's a strength that most operators avoid entirely. So being direct and consistent is definitely the right instinct, but the exhaustion is real. It would drive me insane. I don't like wasting people's time, and I definitely don't like people wasting my time. So this would this circle that you're in, this cycle would drive me insane. I would need to find a switch. So we're going to find a switch for you. Having the same conversation on repeat without seeing anything change is demoralizing. So I would say, yes, there's something missing, but it's not necessarily the conversation because the conversation is not an accountability system, it's an input. We just talked about, you know, shadowing is an input. Having a conversation is also an input. Just like having a pre-shift is an input. What's missing is structure that follows the conversation and makes that change stick. So the slide back pattern that you're seeing is most likely caused by one of three things. I don't know this to be true, but I'm going to assume that it's one of these three things. One, there's no written record of what was agreed when they started. Two, there's no follow-up checkpoint for you to follow up and see how they're doing and audit the process. Three, there's no consequences that make the pattern costly enough to actually change, to stick. So you having that verbal conversation with no documentation at all is literally just a conversation. And then it's in that moment and then done. After that, nothing's gonna stick. But a verbal conversation with a written note and also a specific expectation of what you're looking for, and a follow-up date, that is the beginning of holding somebody accountable. Because now there's stuff on there that you can reference back to. Can't reference back to verbal conversations, it just doesn't happen. Two people remember things differently. Now, the two-week improvement followed by that slide back, that is a pattern worth noting because that means that there's pressure up front. So you're having the conversation, it's partially sticking, but in within two weeks, they heard the feedback, and then nothing in their environment changed to reinforce that new behavior once the pressure faded, so they reverted back to their old ways because there was no follow-up, like we just talked about. Accountability without follow through is just criticism on delay, honestly. It's gonna tell people what's wrong without building a path to actually fix it. So after every accountability conversation moving forward, I would do three things. I would write down what the specific issue is. I would write down what is the expected behavior looking like moving forward that you want them to perform. And then when you'll be checking back in to make sure that we're moving in a positive direction. Share it with the employee so that way it's a shared agreement, not a one-sided verdict. They can check back to it, they can refer to it. I would set the follow-up date in the conversation that itself, then. Not I'll be watching, not, you know, um, we'll check back. But uh a very definitive, hey, let's check back in two weeks and talk about how this is going. It completely changes the dynamic from surveillance to active support. That's what we're looking for. Active support. I I write it at the end of pretty much every LinkedIn post that I have. It's data tells you what happened, presence tells you what's happening. Presence. Presence is such an instrumental part of a successful restaurant. How can you make any changes if you don't know what's happening? That just doesn't work in my head. If the pattern continues to repeat after a structured, documented follow-up, then there's information you need to make a bigger decision. They have to be let go, or consequences need to be bigger. But at that point, the decision is a little bit easier because now your process is clean. Now there's nothing, there's no way that anybody can come back and say that it was ambiguous or it was confusing. It is set in stone because you have a document that says what the issue was, what the expected turnaround or the expected change was to be, and when you were going to follow up with them. The goal of accountability is not to catch people failing. It's to keep people in the lane so they don't fail. To build the structure, making it harder to fail, setting them up for success. Holding people accountable is setting them up for success. How can we set you up for success? And if you start to falter, how can we reel you back in to make sure you stay successful and you don't continue to make the mistakes? But that's monitoring, that's presence, that is keeping an eye on, that is setting expectations clearly. That's building a system that makes it means something. It's all of these things. So having the standards clearly and explicitly written down in a documented form is so, so, so important to hold people accountable and to make sure that you're consistent in everything that you do. And to make sure everybody is very clear in how you want things run, not only in operations, but in culture, in everything. Document everything. I document everything. If I could show people my Google Drives and emails and stuff from every position I've held, I brought everything with me and I kept it with me because every problem that I had in any given moment, I documented because I wanted it to be replicated and duplicated if somebody else should have the same problem. Do that for everything, and you're good. Because standards without documentation are preferences. Training without verification is observation. Accountability without follow-through is noise. The fix in all three of these is the same. Build the structure that makes the intention real. Do that, and you'll be good. So thanks to everybody for sending in their submissions today. Truly appreciate it, as I do every single week. Uh, if you again are dealing with a challenge yourself that you would like to get some insight on, please reach out to the suggestionrestaurant solutions.com. It has been another great week. Really good conversation. Looking forward to next week as well. Have a great week, everybody. Talk to you soon.