Human Resource Planning Human resource planning involves getting the right number of people with right skills

at right place at right time to implement organizational strategies in order to achieve organizational objectives. In light of the organization s objectives, corporate and business level strategies, human resource planning is the process of analyzing an organization s human resource needs and developing plans, policies, and systems to satisfy those needs. Develop Good Restaurant Manager Restaurant manager plays some of the most important roles in restaurant s operations, management and building an overall image of your establishment. At a minimum, a good restaurant manager should demonstrate excellent customer skills, exhibit superior employee management abilities and have extensive experience with restaurant industry. During an interview process, there are several key areas that should be probed to identify the best possible candidate for the job: Guest Experience It is important that a restaurant manager has extensive guest experience, whether in the capacity of a restaurant manager, waiter, or any other similar experience in related industries. A good restaurant manager should have a verifiable track record of successfully running the frontof-house operations. This includes interacting with guests, resolving customer service issues, identifying potential problems and ensuring that guests receive the highest level of customer service. Sales Restaurant manager should have superior people skills and should be able to lead staff in every sales effort to boost revenue. A good manager will ensure that his/her staff is constantly looking out for the financial well-being of your establishment by pursuing sales strategies to increase overall revenue. This might include up-selling techniques, special events, employee incentive programs, and so on. Staff Relations Restaurant manager is responsible for hiring, managing, training, and daily interacting with staff. A good manager should always be on the look-out for the right talent. He will be responsible for establishing standards for employees and ensuring that employees live up to those standards. This includes opening and closing procedures, cash handling procedures, personal hygiene, dress code, employee assessment, etc. It is important that your manager has superior leadership skills in order to have the authority to lead the staff. A restaurant manager should lead by example and be able to perform any job in the restaurant better than anybody else.

Staff Training Program Restaurant manager should be capable of developing and implementing a thorough training program for all new and current staff. It is critical to impart new knowledge or relevant industry developments to your staff, which means that a manager should be prepared to regularly train and coach your employees. This will ensure that the staff does not remain complacent and that your employees evolve together with your vision for the restaurant. Opening and Closing Procedures There are very important for day-to-day restaurant operations. In fact, it is one of the most critical operational tasks that a restaurant manager should master to perfection. On a typical day, a restaurant manager will deal with sensitive information, such as safes, security systems, codes to the cash register, and so on. Manager will be accountable for the cash flow and proper reporting procedures. This requires that you hire a highly responsible and trust-worthy individual, with a clean background check record. Inventory Tracking It is another important operational task that should be handled by a manager. Make sure you hire a person who understands how inventory tracking works in a restaurant, and that it is important to account for all purchases, expenses and sales and keep an updated and accurate inventory log. Not only will this ensure a proper financial accounting, it will also save money due to the decrease in spoilage, over-purchasing, and other excessive practices. Keep Good Image of Restaurant In the restaurant industry, image is everything. The kitchen and waitstaff is the image of a restaurant. If an employee comes in and is wearing a dirty or unkept uniform, it is not putting forth a good image of the restaurant. It is a common occurrence for employees to have unclean uniforms, but they are simply sent home. If it happens frequently, they are let go. Most people visiting restaurants use all of their senses to evaluate the establishment in which they visit. Sight, sound, taste and smell will allow them decide if they will return again. When a waiter comes to the table and the consumer see that his or her uniform is pressed and white, they get the impression of cleanliness. When a waiter comes to the table to take an order and his or her uniform is stained and smelly, they simple order coffee and then leave. It gives the impression of an unclean establishment and that sanitary conditions may not be the first propriety. It is doubtful that they will return. For a restaurant, word of mouth is very important. Negative remarks tend to be remembered more than positive ones. To promote positive hygiene and cleanliness habits when it comes to restaurant uniforms, set code of conduct rules for the establishment. It should be established that all uniforms are to be cleaned and pressed.

Some restaurant owners realize that the cost of dry-cleaning may be a hardship for their employees, and offer to have the uniforms cleaned at the restaurants expense. Some restaurants feel that it is not appropriate to wear perfume while working, as some consumers are allergic to them. A wrinkled uniform gives the impression of untidiness among staff. It is an indication the restaurant is does not care about cleanliness. Some restaurants have their restaurant uniform made out of polyester. This help to avoid wrinkles, appearing much neater. It is well all known that a dirty restaurant uniform as is unpreventable. By the end of a long workday, almost everything that was served over the course of the night ends up on a restaurant uniform. But it is unacceptable at the start of the workday. If your kitchen staff any amount of time in the dining room, make sure they change into clean uniforms before they go out to greet the customers. Additionally, if an employee is serving meat at a buffet table, have additional uniforms ready to change into. A uniform code should be part of your hiring and training policies. A uniform that looks old dirty or in tatters, speaks subconsciously to your customers in the restaurant and about the person wearing it. Unfortunately, the customers see a dirty, unkempt uniform as a extension of your overall business, and usually that image is what they will remember about their experience in your restaurant. On the other hand, a clean uniform says the exact opposite: A neat and clean atmosphere, impressively dressed waitstaff. By initiating a policy on clean restaurant uniforms will assist in the overall image of a business. Some employees feel that if they are enough of an asset, the disciplinary measures that will be taken will be minimum. It is critical to the well being of any restaurant. It's a policy that is very easy to enforce and maintain. Clean uniforms send the message that this is a clean restaurant in the eyes of your customers, which is a wonderful reason for them to keep coming back. A restaurant uniform is usually pressed white pleated pants with a pressed white jacket and a pressed white shirt. For women, it is a pressed white blouse and pressed white skirt. A white apron can be worn it is decided by the establishment. The aprons can be long or short. This is also decided by the establishment. This is not always the case. In some establishments that have a theme to them, the restaurant uniform will take on the theme. Some customers feel this is a fun relaxing way to spend the evening. Many establishments that are child orientated have cartoon characters as waitstaff. The children do not feel intimidated by the waitstaff, and they are more relaxed. Some even have mascots. There are clubs and bars and pubs that have restaurant uniform, these restaurant uniforms usually consist of low cut blouses and short skirts. These were designed to keep the patrons happy and most of all buying drinks. An inventive entrepreneur can take an abandoned building and turn it into a thriving restaurant. With a theme, the waitstaff is everything. There have been some who have taken abandoned jails and turned them into thriving restaurants. In each jail cell there was a table that seats four. Low lighting increased the ambiance of the restaurant. Waiters and waitress'

restaurant uniforms were those of guards. The "Warden" of the prison was the host who sat the customers. They are waiters and theme players; there restaurant uniform depicts what they are. This type of restaurant is popping up across the United States. A restaurant uniform can say a lot about a facility. Depending upon the region of the world that the restaurant is in. For regions where the temperature is quite hot, wait staff uniforms consist of a white long sleeve cotton shirt with a tie and vest. The pants for the restaurant are black pleated pants and black dress shoes. The vests can be interchanged with jackets, but the pants always remain black. The jackets that are worn are come in different colors signifying the position of the wearer. For some restaurants, their uniforms have been time tested. For example, McDonald's restaurant chain has had the some colours restaurant uniforms for decades. They have recently hired some of the top designers in the country to redesign their restaurant uniforms. Customer Satisfaction Three distinct types of training were used for the study: traditional classroom style; interactive media style using word documents, e-mail communications, computer simulations and videos; and on-the-job training. There were six restaurants (approximately twenty managers in each group) that received customer satisfaction training using each of the training methods, as well as a control group of six restaurants that received no additional training in customer satisfaction. This study was precluded by a needs analysis done by the franchise organization regarding what customer satisfaction and service issues the district managers of the organization believed needed attention. All of the district managers of the organization participated in a focus group to determine the needs of the restaurants. During the month of October 2001, the district managers went to their restaurants and observed behaviors to determine which job skills their managers lacked regarding customer service and satisfaction. They wanted to base a training program on the needs they saw in the system. They also wanted to be able to measure the results of the training program in order to assess its effectiveness. The training program, entitled Customer Over-Satisfaction was based on the following curriculum: 1) Moments of Truth - this taught managers the skill to see the restaurant from the guest perspective. A moment of truth is defined as the brief time when the customer is evaluating the quality of service in an establishment (Normann, 1984). 2) Customer Interaction- this gave the managers the skills needed to positively interact with guests in the restaurant. 3) Customer Complaints- this gave the managers the skills needed to please a guest with a complaint. Each group of managers was trained on the same content regarding customer satisfaction, but the training was delivered using three different methods. The classroom style of training is defined as an instructional strategy in which a teacher or trainer leads discussions,

gives information, and facilitates group interactions in order to pass along knowledge and information on a topic. The classroom training was done using lecture, discussions and videos. In using the interactive media format, the manager was asked to complete all of the necessary training using the computer by reading informational documents, and then applying the information to computer simulators regarding the same customer over-satisfaction curriculum. The trainer sent the computer documents and the simulator programs to the restaurants for the managers to complete at work. There were also e-mails that explained the program and followed up on the completion of the training program. The on-the-job training method required the trainer to work individually with each manager at the restaurant. The trainer discussed each skill, demonstrated proper use of the skill, and then observed the manager during their shift to give feedback on the use of the skill. A fourth group of managers functioned as a control group. They did not receive any of the additional customer satisfaction training that the experimental groups received. In order to monitor the effects of the customer satisfaction training, the control group met in a classroom setting, but received information on marketing and new product development rather than customer satisfaction. The training was intended to improve customer satisfaction in the restaurants. In order to determine training effectiveness, three variables were chosen to measure customer satisfaction before and after training was completed. The three business outcomes measured were: mystery shopper scores, customer satisfaction survey scores, and number of customer complaints as a percent of total customers. The mystery shopper is a scored visit to a restaurant completed by trained customers unknown to the restaurant. These shoppers evaluate the quality of service as it relates to speed, friendliness and overall quality of the visit. Many businesses use mystery shoppers to evaluate performance of a service business (Russ-eft & Preskill, 2001). The customer satisfaction surveys were compiled from a list of survey questions used by the Gallup Organization (2000) and the fast food chain represented in the current study to gauge overall customer satisfaction. A principal components analysis was used to assess the reliability of the customer satisfaction survey from the pre-training data and post-training data. It was determined that one factor clearly emerged in each analysis (eigenvalues 4.354 for pretraining data and 3.886 for post-training data). For purposes of this study, this factor will be referred to as overall customer satisfaction. All other eigenvalues fell below the 1.0 threshold and therefore were not considered. Customer complaint counts, as a percent of total number of customers, was the final business outcome that was measured. Since the training was designed to improve customer satisfaction, and complaints are related to dissatisfaction, complaints need to be measured to obtain part of that information.

Selection criteria of restaurant manager 1. Knows Everything: You need to find a person who not only can locate the extra pack of paper towels, but also knows the delivery guy s nickname. A person who absorbs information is extremely valuable and has the potential to learn a lot more. 2. Flexible: It s important that you can select a person who isn t worried about uncertainty or problems. The ability to be flexible helps people overcome big problems without breaking a huge sweat. 3. Able to Deal With Mistakes: Everyone makes mistakes and it s a leader job to accept responsibility for ALL of them. Find someone who doesn t have a problem owning up to mistakes or fixing the mistakes of others. You need someone who realizes that a mistake doesn t matter as much as the results at the end of the day. 4. Reads the Future (and future problems): Simply running a restaurant or kitchen day-to-day is hard enough, but successful owners know that mapping out the future is even harder. Find a person who thinks ahead and anticipates future sales, goals, and ideas. They may not all pan out, but the energy to prepare for upcoming goals and work towards them is a huge step in the right direction. 5. Motivation: Everyone gets out of bed for a reason. Make sure your managerial candidate isn t solely driven by the need to get a better title and a bigger paycheck. Make sure that your management choice is also motivated to learn and grow. 6. Independent But Not Oblivious: It s crucial to locate a leader who has the skill to stand on his/her own and strongly dictate the course of action. However, that same person needs to be accessible and able to understand the worries, frustrations, and plight of their subordinates. A manager who doesn t understand the staff will lose control and simply create a forum for angry gossip. 7. Ability to Compromise: Dealing with customers, suppliers, and the emotions of a full team takes a lot of juggling, smiling, and straight talking. It s essential you find someone who s not only up to the task, but thrives on the jobs constant dramatic stresses and joys. 8. Snappy Dresser: The F&B industry is half sweat and half charm. Make sure your future leader knows the value of a suit and a good pair of shoes. Not only will this impress clients and customers, but also it ll give an example worth following for the rest of staff.

Recruitment The methods of recruitment open to a business are often categorised into: Internal recruitment is when the business looks to fill the vacancy from within its existing workforce. External recruitment is when the business looks to fill the vacancy from any suitable applicant outside the business. Advantages Disadvantages

Internal Recruitment

Cheaper and quicker to recruit

Limits the number of potential applicants No new ideas can be introduced from outside the business May cause resentment amongst candidates not appointed Creates another vacancy which needs to be filled Longer process

People already familiar with the business and how it operates Provides opportunities for promotion with in the business can be motivating Business already knows the strengths and weaknesses of candidates External Recruitment Outside people bring in new ideas

Larger pool of workers from which to find the best candidate

More expensive process due to advertisements and interviews required

People have a wider range of experience

Selection process may not be effective enough to reveal the best candidate

The four most popular ways of recruiting externally are: Job centres - These are paid for by the government and are responsible for helping the unemployed find jobs or get training. They also provide a service for businesses needing to advertise a vacancy and are generally free to use.

Job advertisements - Advertisements are the most common form of external recruitment. They can be found in many places (local and national newspapers, notice boards, recruitment fairs) and should include some important information relating to the job (job title, pay package, location, job description, how to apply-either by CV or application form). Where a business chooses to advertise will depend on the cost of advertising and the coverage needed (i.e. how far away people will consider applying for the job Recruitment agency - Provides employers with details of suitable candidates for a vacancy and can sometimes be referred to as head-hunters . They work for a fee and often specialise in particular employment areas e.g. nursing, financial services, teacher recruitment Personal recommendation - Often referred to as word of mouth and can be a recommendation from a colleague at work. A full assessment of the candidate is still needed however but potentially it saves on advertising cost.