Scared you might have an unidentified infestation of zombies among your restaurant staff? Let’s take a close look at how the behaviour of your worst-performing staff can easily mimic the zombies from the popular TV series, The Walking Dead. We’ve compiled a checklist to help you determine whether your employee performance is a showcase of sleepwalking, customer-loathing zombies.

They have no passion for their work

The zombie worker can’t be bothered with anything, not even themselves. This is a big no-no in any work situation, and it can jeopardise your reputation in the hospitality industry. With most of your staff required to interact face-to-face with your customers, there’s no room for lacklustre employee performance. Don’t let the passionless zombie drag your restaurant’s name through the mud. Just as there’s no way to effectively inject passion into an unwilling body, cut your losses and find a live(ly) and willing replacement.

They are detrimentally slow

As you well know, speed is a core ingredient in a successful restaurant. On the other hand, the zombie waiter possesses the genes of a tortoise – patrons get cold meals, end up starving or simply get up and go after waiting ages for the foot-dragging server to appear. Aside from physical speed limitations, the zombie waiter is also a slow learner. You’ll end up spending valuable time and resources getting them ready for action, only to find that they’ll never meet your employee performance standards anyway.

They have trouble speaking

Grunting and moaning – the key communication characteristics of a zombie. While the workplace zombie perhaps has a bigger vocabulary, they will still struggle to string together coherent sentences. As you well know, the most important factor in successful waitering is people skills. To ensure that your employee performance doesn’t crumble when it comes to customers, you need to immediately root out zombies in your restaurant. If additional training doesn’t do the trick, it’s on to disciplinary action – it’s as simple as that.

They are easily distracted

It’s only human to be distracted at some point during the working day. But considering all the above-mentioned characteristics of the zombie worker, it’s not hard to imagine to what degree they can be distracted – and with dire consequences. The modern-day zombie is, of course, distracted more by technology than by human flesh. You’ll find them staring blankly at their cellphones with the order they took a few minutes ago already a distant memory.

It can be a draining task to keep a close eye on every single employee at all times to determine if you have a zombie in your midst. But there is a solution to help you effectively measure employee performance so you can pinpoint the weaklings in your workforce.

Utilising Pilot’s powerful Point of Sale solution allows you to monitor every order processed, table served and bill closed by your staff. To find out more about how you can harness intuitive back-end data to improve your employee performance, download our free guide to Restaurant Data: Everything you need to know.

Author : Rudi Badenhorst

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Employee performance Restaurant restaurant industry