Imagine a career where the demands of the job are largely detached from what it is you’re being graded on.
That is what managing a restaurant is like for too many people.
Ensuring a high level of service and supervising the dining experience is becoming an increasingly small percentage of a manager’s job. Meanwhile, manual admin tasks like exporting data and making sense of it in spreadsheets accounts for a disproportionate amount of managers’ time.
There’s too much going on at restaurants to excel (no pun intended) at both things, and the context-switching between managing people and sorting data is challenging.
Is this really how restaurant owners want managers to divide their time?
Misaligned Expectations In Restaurants
When managers are spread too thin, a few things occur.
Service suffers because managers are stuck in the office with admin work. This occurs more frequently when managers are burned out from working too many closes in a row, so they gravitate toward computer tasks.
Also, one manager is often designated as the “admin manager,” and this person focuses almost entirely on back-office to-do’s that nobody else wants to worry about. When this happens, restaurants lose a significant amount of productivity on the floor.
We also see a disconnect among managers at different levels of experience. Veteran GMs may be naturally strong on the floor, but less tech-savvy. And newer managers may be intimidated by managing the floor, but they like spreadsheets. So neither group develops their weaknesses.
To solve these problems, there needs to be an acknowledgment that this behavior is occurring and a commitment to solving it. This is the genesis of Axial Commerce’s software, which is designed by veterans of the restaurant industry to allow managers to make the highest and best use of their time.
This means less time in front of a computer crunching numbers, and more time maximizing the dining experience, which is what managers are being evaluated on anyways.
To start a free trial, to schedule a demo, or to learn more, register at https://app.axialcommerce.com/register or contact us by clicking here.
