Create restaurant SOPs to improve your bottom line
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Restaurant owners set the standards they expect all staff members to meet by creating and sharing standard operating procedures, or SOPs. Adhering to your restaurant SOPs is essential if you want top-tier restaurant management with top-tier safety measures in place.
Sure, restaurant SOPs are official documents that establish delivery standards, but that doesn’t mean they can’t reflect what makes your business unique. You don’t have to copy another restaurant’s standard operating procedures if your staff has found a different way to do a task that’s both safe and efficient.
It’s best practice to tailor them to your business. When done right, restaurant SOPs not only keep your staff and customers safe, but they can help keep your restaurant business booming.
In this article, we’ll define SOPs and clarify which types are important in the restaurant industry. We’ll also share tips on how to create your own restaurant SOPs and how you can use them to your advantage.
What are restaurant SOPs?
In the restaurant industry, SOPs or standard operating procedures are written procedures that document how to run your restaurant safely and effectively.
A food-preparation SOP, for example, could explain to staff members which chopping boards to use to cut raw meat and how to prep the meat with correct food handling. A food-safety SOP could give a step-by-step guide on proper food storage and rotation in refrigerators. There are SOPs that focus on sanitizing kitchen equipment, all the way to the basics of how and when staff should wash hands.
When most people think of restaurant SOPs, they think of the back-of-house processes and personal hygiene of food service workers. However, restaurant SOPs do apply to front-of-house operations too. It’s not all about health and safety, it can be about setting standards for the way FOH staff interact with diners, including ways to address more serious issues that may arise. Here are just a few examples of FOH restaurant SOPs:
- How to engage correctly with kitchen staff
- How to follow billing procedures
- How to greet and seat diners
- How to respond to foodborne illness complaints
- How to use POS systems
How can you create your own restaurant SOPs?
From food waste management to order taking via apps, there’s a restaurant SOP just waiting for you to write it. But how do compose an SOP in the first place and then make sure your staff members see them?
First, search for ‘SOP template’ in your search engine of choice. There are tons of templates that you can adopt as your own. You can opt for really official-looking documents that could both bore and terrify your employees at the same time. Or try easy-to-read flow charts that streamline processes into concise information with visual cues and simple language.
When drafting your restaurant SOPs, make sure you talk to your staff members before just creating generic guides. Talk to your dishwasher about how the dishwasher works, the chef de partie about grill times, and your FOH manager about which greeting procedures work best. Their input is more valuable than any information you can find online because it applies directly to what works in your restaurant.
Restaurant SOPs often get stored in huge intimidating folders in a hard-to-reach area of the kitchen. Great for when food inspectors turn up, but not so great for staff members who are unsure how to complete a task, especially FOH staff.
A simple solution to this problem can make SOPs accessible to all your front-line workers, even when they’re off duty: Share your SOPs via a software solution such as Trainual. This will give staff members access to your SOPs via their smartphones (something that almost everyone owns these days).
These are business software solutions and therefore come with a price tag. An easy and free alternative is to save all your SOPs on Google Docs and then share the documents with your staff members, ensuring only they have access.
What are the advantages of restaurant SOPs?
Having restaurant SOPs in place has many advantages, some more obvious than others. Firstly, all your staff will be on the same page. If there is ever confusion or conflict between your employees on the correct method of doing things, they can always refer to an SOP on that particular subject.
Relying on word of mouth to pass safety-critical information to new starters can be dangerous as information gets lost along the way. Having documented safety procedures available to everyone can help, especially across different restaurants in chain operations.
By combining FOH SOPs and BOH SOPs, restaurateurs can expect to lower customer complaints and provide a better dining experience. For example, say you improve food presentation with an SOP for various dish preparations and create a more positive atmosphere in your dining area with an SOP on FOH customer interaction. With this effective combo, you will raise customer service standards across the board and improve your ranking on social media and reputation via word of mouth.
Every restaurant owner everywhere dreads a visit from a food safety inspector–especially if that visit is impromptu. If a staff member makes a mistake, it can look horrible during an inspection. But, if you have a restaurant SOP on hand, you can show that you have the correct methods in place. You can argue that this was an isolated incident and your SOPs demonstrate how you run your restaurant day to day.
Creating restaurant SOPs can be enjoyable
Rounding up your staff members to create a revised set of restaurant SOPs can be an enjoyable experience that can lead to positive changes within the workplace. It also allows every staff member to be heard–and appreciated–since they’re the expert at whatever it is they do every shift.
Remember that restaurant SOPs can apply to every facet of your restaurant operations, and you can create as many or as few as you see fit. You can modernize your restaurant SOPs by sharing them via apps or Google Docs. Restaurant SOPs can help to lower customer complaints and can help to get you out from under during a food safety inspector visit.
Looking at your FOH SOPs could reveal a weakness in your restaurant’s technology solutions. Take charge of your front-of-house management and improve your customer’s experience with Yelp Guest Manager. This software supports your team by handling reservations and waitlists, allowing customers to check themselves in, and much more.
Get a demo and include using Guest Manager as one of your FOH SOPs. After all, restaurants that start using Guest Manager experience up to 2X the traffic on their Yelp Business Page. And restaurants that use Guest Manager paired with the Yelp Ads experience up to 2.3X the traffic!*