5 THINGS THAT HOSPITALITY MANAGERS HATE!
Buzzfeed has done a great job covering all the crazy things customers do to make working in Hospitality occasionally painful. However, with more operators than ever asking ‘how can I retain new managers?’ (particularly in their first 90 days when new joiners are statistically most likely to leave) we thought it might be fun to examine sources of irritation closer to home - within the team!
1. Sickies, no shows and shift-swap shuffles
Top of our naughty list is that colleague who goes on a big night out, plasters the madness across Instagram, and then promptly catches an unknown illness the morning after (with first symptoms arising about 45 minutes before they’re due on shift).
Perhaps even more frustrating is when staff play the equivalent of shift-swapping chinese whispers in their private WhatsApp group. Friday night rolls around and half the team is missing. You start calling down the list and it turns out that Will actually swapped the first half of his shift with Lily, who traded a pint for Seb to take over the first hour of that, and … you get the idea.
2. Being hounded on your day off
It’s your first Saturday off in months, plonked in front of Netflix eating a 6-pack of Tesco’s jam doughnuts, and an Assistant Manager asks you to call in urgently because you are literally the only person in the world who knows how to solve a critical problem which has arisen from nowhere. It turns out the toilet is clogged, they can’t remember the safe code, they don’t know a supplier’s phone number for a missing delivery, the draught gas isn’t working etc. You find yourself wondering if it would have been less annoying to discover the world was indeed ending.
3. That colleague who needs a ‘MILITARY STYLE’ uniform inspection
We all have that one staff member who continually finds new and inventive ways to turn up in a barely acceptable approximation of the official company uniform. Why is it that our most academically gifted colleagues tend to be the ones who least understand that a graphic Game of Thrones print does not count as a “plain black shirt”? You fantasise about making him clean the toilets with a toothbrush, but the manager’s handbook prohibits you from doing anything other than further depleting your box of spare T’s in the staff room.
4. Trying to explain inexcusable stock outages
There are few experiences quite as soul-crushing as having to explain to your team and customers that (for reasons entirely beyond your control) there’s no Aperol in the middle of August, or somehow no red wine mid-December. Sometimes, a staff member will perk up and say “Oh, I remember seeing some of X downstairs” only to check the cellar and realise that the remaining pineapple juice went out of date 6 months ago, despite numerous “very thorough” stock checks taking place.
5. Staff forgetting everything they were taught in training
No one wants to be a helicopter manager calling out every little thing the team does wrong. However, sometimes it’s just impossible to miss that staff member passionately talking a customer out of buying a premium option or the one who haplessly recites the speedrail when asked for a special gin recommendation. Then there’s the experience of finding out that your star bartender, who you thought had mastered that art of both speed and perfect serve simultaneously, was somehow never trained on the spec sheet (and has ingeniously figured out that stirring all shaken drinks is marginally faster and saves on washing)!
What did we miss!? Please tell us your managerial pet peeves - and how you solve them (if you’ve managed to!) on Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram.
About Yapster
Yapster is a mobile communication system, designed to unleash talent on the frontline. It is used by companies including BrewDog, Flat Iron, Marstons plc (Revere Division), Mission Mars, Nobu Hotels, Yummy Pubs and many others. Learn more here.
