Some ideas for getting the most out of your crew.
In the May 2005 issue of QSR magazine, we spoke with Eric Chester, author of Getting Them To Give a Damn, about motivating Generation Y workers --- aka your restaurant crew. Following are some of the best practices that emerged.
Yesterday’s managerial tactics no longer work. If you keep doing what you've always done before, you'll just end up pulling your hair out and say you aren’t going to hire youth anymore. You’ve got to find ways to share the wealth. When business is good, we all succeed.
For example, Eddie Bauer stores set performance goals, and when the store reaches those goals, everybody at that store receives a bump in pay. Some quick-serves say, “I’ll start you at $6 an hour, then 90 days from now I’ll give you a 25-cent raise.” What if I can come in and reach my performance goals in the first two weeks? If your system says that I don’t get a raise until I work for 90 days, then I’m out of here.
Gen Y workers want to be mentored. They want someone to take an active interest in them, but they aren’t going to buy into your business until you have some interest in who they are. If it’s going to be a surface relationship, they will put A onto B onto C and do it for X dollars, but don’t ask them to do anything else.
Find your Opies. The Opie character from The Andy Griffith Show is someone who bought completely into his situation and aligned his goals with his employer's goals. The Opie for your business might not be the Opie for someone else's. Sometimes you want the best kid in school, the 4.0 student, the president of the student body, the football star. But that kid might be too tied up to work for you.
A better way to find Opies is to look at your success stories. What do they all have in common? Were they all swimmers? Did they live nearby or take certain courses at school? If you can create a profile of your Opie, you can connect the dots and figure out where people like that go. That’s where you want to recruit.
Coldstone Creamery is innovative in their approach; they bring kids to their national conventions to compete in ice cream Olympics. The kids know about these competitions and that they will have a chance to travel and compete. Coldstone’s whole process of recruiting is different. Instead of a "Now Hiring" sign, they have a "Now Auditioning" sign. Candidates have to audition for a job in front of other employees. Coldstone Creamery wants extroverted kids who will put on a performance, and they are one of the fastest growing franchises in America today.
Bottom line: Gen X and Gen Y are your customer base. If you can’t connect to them as employees, you can’t connect to them as customers, so you had better understand them. One out of every four people on the planet is a member of these generations, and this percentage is growing. They will not automatically mature and be like you. Some of their attitudes and behaviors may soften, but their values will remain in place.
