The systems, apps and businesses in our life have customer experience down to an art. Whether it’s paying with your watch, being sucked in for another Instagram checkup or ordering a 1-click Amazon order, it’s quick, seamless and often the experience itself is part of the pleasure.
And then you get to work.
While the world as a consumer is full of software and technology designed to make you feel amazing, most interfaces used in the workplace lag far behind. Often trapped in paper or decided by managers and understood by nobody else.
These interfaces could not be further from the interfaces employees use in their life on the other side of the table. And the more frustrating you make an interface for employees, the more time they spend struggling with systems instead of concentrating on customers.
In the desk world, everyone talks about how tools like Slack and Google Docs are bringing a consumer experience and mindset to business tools.
So what is stopping these innovations from reaching the huge element of the workforce who don’t spend 8 hours staring at a screen all day?
The Future Is Here, It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed Yet
More and more restaurant chains are thinking about their employees’ experience, the tools they interact with every day, and ultimately how the interface between their teams and managers can directly improve the experience for the customer too.
So what should you be doing to optimise employees?
1. Let’s Get Digital
It’s quite normal in the restaurant business for there to only be one version of the most important information. Things like rotas are updated at short notice, and duplicates would only increase the potential for misunderstandings.
But if you confine that to a paper notice, tacked up in back-of-house, you force everyone to visit you or at least call up a colleague to get the latest.
If you can keep that information in a central, cloud-hosted location, then anyone can access it, through any device, and always the latest version. This empowers your workers, makes it easier to swap shifts (through you), easier to check on mobile, and easier to stay coordinated to the latest schedule
2. Keep on Communicating
Similarly, it’s easy for a single manager to become a bottleneck for communicating with the team, calling round multiple numbers to distribute information. Then if somebody falls ill or needs to take a holiday, the manager has to ring round everyone again to find a replacement
Instead we should be moving towards a single location where managers can communicate with the whole team, almost like a virtual meeting room.
This means managers will know everyone has seen their messages and for the team, they can reply at any time and know where they’ll find a reply.
3. Research, Report and Learn
You can’t improve what you can’t measure. Once you have all these assets hosted centrally, you can export information about your team alongside customer satisfaction and more.
This is key to understanding the relationship between employee experience and its impact on the end customer in your venues. And then you can reward your team even more effectively and directly on the basis of their efforts.
Why does it work?
Shift workers are often juggling multiple responsibilities — if you can make their job easier to manage and more satisfying, you will be rewarded in loyalty. And they will be able to concentrate on delivering as you need them to.
With this improved employee experience, you can reduce turnover and and improve the consistency of your service.
Ultimately, these benefits are just the same as the rewards of improving the experience for your customers. As usual, technology alone is just a foundation — but by freeing up your human resources to concentrate more on the moment and their priorities, everybody benefits.