5 THINGS THAT IRRITATE YOUR AREA MANAGER!
Last week we decided to have some fun with a ‘buzzfeed style’ article for our user community - 5 things that hospitality managers hate!. With 90 Day Labour Retention a key focus for many businesses at the moment, the piece received lots of attention and ignited a few lively discussions amongst our site general manager and area manager friends!
Given how much we enjoyed those hearty and humorous debates, we thought it would be remiss of us to not publicly share this further set of industry insider pet peeves...
1. Complaining about problems a great manager would solve (allegedly!)
So it turns out that many Area Managers are unsympathetic to GMs who suffer unreliable colleagues, day off crisis calls, poor uniform compliance or staff forgetting everything they’re taught. Consensus opinion amongst our Area Manager friends is that the best site GMs can pick frontline talent like Brad Pitt in Moneyball and coach strugglers to greatness like Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own. To be fair, there was more sympathy for GMs who routinely have to explain inexcusable stock outages. In that instance our Drill Sergeant Area Manager friends saved their ire for supplier and ops team cock ups.
In summary, more than a few Area Managers believe “only the paranoid survive” and expect their GMs to prepare for daily setbacks accordingly!
2. ‘Groundhog Day’ site visits (where nothing ever seems to get fixed)
A surefire way to to get on the wrong side of a road warrior Area Manager is to persistently fail to fix issues identified during their last site visit. Whilst they’re generally happy to crawl up the M1 twice a month for ‘a chat’ with you, it turns out those visits aren’t purely social...
3. Managers who don’t even pretend to try to hit labour budgets
If you’re interested in pyrotechnics, this issue represents the hottest button on an Area Manager’s already-melting keyboard. The key to hitting a hospitality P&L forecast (or retail, for that matter) is getting each site’s labour to sales ratio right. Occasionally an unexpected blizzard (or global pandemic) will cause foot traffic to depart from expectations, but 9 times out of 10 customer volumes throughout the week will be relatively predictable - and therefore so should staffing requirements.
“SO WHY THEN ARE WE ALWAYS OVER STAFFED BETWEEN 2-5PM ON TUESDAYS??” the Area Manager begs, with a sneaking suspicion that the team in question have lifestyle reasons for not solving this rota management mystery.
4. Playing ‘pass the parcel’ with customer complaints
As much as some Area Managers like to think of themselves as great commanders of armies, few enjoy coordinating complaint resolution decisions up, down and across their chain of command. Even the most tyrannical regional leaders generally prefer discounts or refunds (within reason!) to be offered quickly and locally when something goes wrong for a customer - without an Area Manager’s wax seal of approval.
5. Sloppy standards
How hard is it to plate a burger and fries the same way each time? According to the Area Managers who’ve been in touch with us, a surprising number of chefs, managers and service teams in their patches seem to struggle to distinguish between 2 chips and 200. Front of house friends, we recommend taking the heat of the kitchen rather than your regional leader next time you’re presented with an off-spec plate to carry during a site visit!!
Get in touch
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.
