A short monologue (YouTube video) by Donald Burns describing a practical system for evaluating restaurant employees. The speaker explains three core dimensions they measure — teamwork (who "runs" or runs food), sales of value-added items ("dads": drinks, appetizers, desserts, specials), and tips — and how they combine these with sales value and schedule-based weighting to create an aggregated employee report card. The process requires pulling four reports (food-running tally, itemized sales for "dads", sales-value ranking, and tip-percentage), manual data entry for some pieces, and spot-checking on weekends. The report often surprises staff when an overall grade (e.g., B−) reveals weak contributions to culture or upselling despite strong sales or tips.
Chapters
The customer side is basically driven by sales. The culture side is driven by how often you run food. And that seems silly, but our front of the house runs food. And it's a teamwork dynamic. And so we track and measure who runs, right. We just keep tally of who runs. Got a little clicker. It's a silly little deal. Sometimes we just do it with hash marks. But our expos train to kind of keep track of who's running. The value part of it comes from selling what we call the dads, the drinks, appetizers, desserts and specials. So I've got people who perform higher in sales, but they don't sell those value added items. And I've got people who do both of those really well, but they don't run food or help contribute to the culture part of it. So we look at the delta of all three things. So I've got to pull different reports. I've got to take manual data entry for the food runner report. I've got to sort the report based on items that were sold to see who sold the dads. Then I got to do it on a sales value to see who sold the most. But then I have to weight that based on what day of the week they work and what time. Right. Because I'm gonna have somebody who's gonna look really, really. If they only work Monday through Thursday and they don't work Friday, Saturday, Sunday. In a brunch concept, like, you're smoked, you're dead, right? So there's weighted value to it and we really get this finite. And then of course, we look at the percentage of tips and that's a whole different report. Have to look at a tip report and we want to attach that average tip percentage per person, guest check, number of dads that were sold and their contribution to the team culturally. So that's four different reports I have to pull to be able to distill down this really, really comprehensive team ranking piece that we do, this employee report card piece that we do. And man, when people get their report card and they see that they're an aggregated B minus employee, they're shocked. Like, my sales are high. My tips are so good. Yeah, but you don't upsell anything. And you suck at busting your own tables, clearing your own tables, and running food. And so we measure those three things. It's an interesting little measurable. And we don't do it every single day, but we do spot check that on the weekends, and it's telling. Very cool.
