Although waitstaff, general managers, bartenders, and hosts are often heralded for their customer-facing work, restaurant back-of-house (BOH) employees are some unsung heroes of a dining establishment. You can’t have a restaurant without a back-of-house team to cook, clean, and ideate innovative dishes.
BOH workers are responsible for creating the food that your patrons love. But even if your BOH operations are working for you right now, there are always opportunities for improvement. Learn what back-of-house employees are responsible for, as well as nine tips to manage your restaurant back of house to optimize workflow and heighten the dining experience.
Restaurants have many moving parts. Regardless of your business model, you likely need two teams to keep your restaurant running smoothly.
Front-of-the-house (FOH) employees manage everything that your customers see. From the dining room to the restroom to the waiting areas, FOH employees are responsible for the customer experience. FOH staff usually includes your general manager, waiters, bussers, and all other customer-facing workers.
Your back-of-the-house team encompasses everyone who doesn’t interact with customers directly. This includes positions like:
Kitchen manager: Kitchen managers supervise all BOH employees, ensure food safety, and jump in if the kitchen is short-staffed.
Executive chef: This is the head chef who’s responsible for building a menu, ordering ingredients, and managing inventory.
Sous chef: Literally translated as “under chef,” a sous chef is the second in command in a kitchen. They typically handle scheduling and restaurant staff training.
Line cooks: Most restaurants have at least two line cooks at any given time. Most line cooks work at an assigned station, like the fryer or the grill, to keep the kitchen moving as efficiently as possible.
Dishwashers: Dishwashers are responsible for cleaning dishes, cutlery, and glasses.
Your BOH is responsible for important tasks like food preparation, disinfecting the restaurant, taking inventory, and taking out the trash. While these tasks aren’t as glamorous as serving customers, you can’t operate a safe, successful restaurant without a solid BOH team.
Your restaurant back of house affects various components of restaurant operations from the quality of the food to the cleanliness of the building. Even if everything else is great, subpar performance in the BOH can lead to disgruntled guests and lost revenue. Follow these nine tips to optimize your restaurant back of house.
How you set up your kitchen will ultimately affect your BOH staff’s workflow. This can have a tremendous impact on how quickly you put out orders, as well as how accurate those orders are.
If you’re having trouble churning out dishes on time, rethink your kitchen setup. Separate workstations like your grill, pastry area, fryer, or salad bar to improve the workflow and reduce the risk of cross-contamination. When in doubt, step onto the line yourself to see what needs remedying.
Miscommunication between your front-of-house staff and back-of-house staff members can lead to chaos. Fortunately, technology can keep everyone on the same page. For example, a Square Kitchen Display System (KDS) integrates with your Square POS. It can feed orders to each kitchen workstation, so all of your BOH workers know what’s on their plate.
Best of all, Square KDS integrates with solutions like Square POS and KioskBuddy.Add a self-service kiosk to your front of house and the system will route orders to your KDS. This means your restaurant back-of-house team no longer has to rely on inefficient paper checks, streamlining your BOH even more.
Restaurant owners say that finding and retaining staff is their biggest challenge. As the economy recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic, it can be difficult to find quality BOH employees. Fortunately, regular training can increase employee retention.
For your back of house, conduct weekly staff trainings on:
Knife skills
New ingredients
Cooking methods
The more knowledgeable your restaurant’s back-of-house team members are, the more they can pitch in during a busy Saturday dinner service. For example, if your dishwasher learns how to prep, that serves as a big help for overloaded kitchen staff.
You can also conduct joint training between your front-of-house employees and back-of-house staff. When both teams understand how they work as one, it can reduce frustration and miscommunication during service. Plus, it’s a great way to reduce the “us versus them” mentality that can hurt your team culture.
Just because your kitchen, office, and employee break rooms don’t face the customers, that doesn’t mean you should overlook them. Not only do these BOH spaces need to be hygienic and clean, but they should be well-organized, too. Go beyond the bare minimum food safety codes and make your back of house a pleasant place to work.
Put yourself in the shoes of your back-of-house workers. What needs reorganizing? Is everything labeled and stored in an efficient way? If it isn’t, you can reduce the clutter and confusion by asking your BOH staff to help you revamp the space.
Front-of-house staff often receive more kudos than back-of-house staff simply because they’re more visible. But you want your BOH staff to feel appreciated, too.
Engage your back-of-house staff with perks like:
Advanced training
Employee of the month awards
Commissions
Customer review bonuses
Aside from tangible rewards, give your BOH team the recognition they deserve. Highlight their accomplishments during your staff meetings and training so they feel engaged and satisfied with their work.
Good managers clearly define who is responsible for what. Give every BOH employee a checklist of their role’s duties. This empowers employees to dig in and do their best work while ensuring the team completes every task every shift. And if the team drops the ball, defined responsibilities minimize finger-pointing and encourage accountability.
It’s easy to ignore your back-of-house operations when things are going well. Even so, it’s important to consult your BOH workers for input.
What would make their jobs easier? What needs improvement? Instead of implementing solutions that you think could work, your restaurant back-of-house team can tell you exactly what will work. The key is to take their feedback seriously and act on it. Otherwise, your staff probably won’t share their opinions with you in the future.
Larger menus might give diners more options, but they require more storage, ingredients, and prep time. Simplify your menu to streamline your restaurant back of house. This can help you:
Simplify training
Reduce the number of stations in your kitchen
Reduce returned orders
Instead of overloading kitchen staff with a giant menu, focus on your top-selling dishes. If you want more novelty, you can always ask your executive chef to provide a rotating seasonal menu.
Your front-of-house team has sales goals. Just like your FOH, your BOH team needs goals to work toward in order to encourage growth. Consider setting goals for:
Time per ticket
Error rate
Food waste
BOH goals not only help you improve your profitability, but they give your BOH team something to strive for. This culture of improvement goes a long way to improve the guest experience as well as employee satisfaction.
Margins are thin in the restaurant industry. Better managing your restaurant back of house can save time, reduce expenses, and increase staff satisfaction. To improve your restaurant’s back of house even more, try revamping your BOH spaces, training and rewarding staff, and simplifying your operations.
Solid restaurant management will get you far, but technology will help your team cross the finish line. Streamline front-of-house ordering — and the data it transmits to your BOH team — with a solution like KioskBuddy. Download KioskBuddy now to convert tablets into self-ordering kiosks.