Restaurant employees are burnt out. While the pandemic has undoubtedly played a role here, employee burnout has been an issue in the restaurant industry for decades. Before the pandemic hit, in a 2019 study, 80% of hospitality workers claimed to be burnt out. Burnout can lead to loss of staff, toxic working conditions and loss of revenue. Left unaddressed, burnout could even shutter your establishment.
What Is Employee Burnout?
Psychology Today defines burnout as “a state of emotional, mental and often physical exhaustion brought on by prolonged or repeated stress.”
Before the pandemic, restaurants were already one of the most stressful working environments in the world. COVID-19 has only made it worse.
It is important to note that burnout can come from factors unrelated to work. Family issues, relationship problems and living conditions are just three potential sources of non-work-related burnout. Nothing, however, keeps the symptoms of burnout from entering the workplace. Regardless of the source of the burnout, work and home are the two most common places where burnout manifests itself.
Before we get into managing burnout, let’s take a look at how we can identify it.
How To Identify Employee Burnout
Burnout can be surprisingly easy to identify. There are physical symptoms, such as headaches, dizziness, insomnia and digestive issues, but you’ll likely only know about these symptoms if your employees tell you about them.
Managers and restaurant owners will most easily spot the behavioral signs of burnout. Burnout behavior most often shows up as irritability, mood swings and cynicism. It can also exhibit as depression, lethargy and lack of motivation.
Burnout in restaurants tends to have two primary sources: emotional labor and exhaustion.
Emotional Labor
Emotional labor is the effort required to manage your emotions when interacting with other people as a requirement of doing your job. Emotional labor is a common aspect of restaurant work, especially in the front of house (FOH). During a busy shift, a rude, demanding guest can easily send a server over the edge. The long-standing issue of customer mistreatment of servers and the rising expectation that FOH staff enforce COVID-19 safety procedures make burnout all but inevitable.
To identify burnout from emotional labor, look for curt behavior with guests and employees, unexplained outbursts or silent hiding in the non-guest-facing restaurant areas. Take care not to confuse hiding from work with hiding from burnout. The former tends to look like chatting and goofing off, while burnout hiding tends to be silent and solitary.
Emotional labor-related burnout is also possible in the back of house (BOH). Demanding guests can lead to tickets that are several feet long with loads of modifications. String enough of these together and the BOH will get burnt out as well. Since cooks are incapable of exhibiting behavior toward customers, BOH burnout tends to target the FOH staff.
You might see your cooks loudly complaining about a server’s order tickets. They may demand that food runners and servers move faster or refuse to honor reasonable customer requests. Inevitably, this behavior creates a burnout feedback loop that can scuttle a shift in no time flat.
Exhaustion
Restaurants are understaffed right now, so nearly all current employees are overworked. Staff who once were only servers now must assume bartending, hosting, food running and even dishwashing duties. The nature of restaurant work, however, led to overwork even in pre-pandemic times. Shifts are long and demanding. Work schedules are ever-shifting. Rushes can come out of nowhere. This heady brew of uncertainty and dramatic adrenaline spikes can easily lead to exhaustion.
The most common symptom of exhaustion is moving slowly, lacking focus, and being less productive than usual. If your top-selling bartender’s sales take a dive or your lead line cook suddenly forgets key ingredients, they are likely exhausted. Exhaustion can be dangerous since exhausted employees are more prone to workplace accidents and injuries. Some organizations have found that exhausted workers are as prone to accidents and injuries as intoxicated workers.
Exhaustion can also lead to injuries outside of the workplace. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration cites fatigue as a probable cause of up to 800 car-related deaths per year. Most of those drowsy driving-related accidents happen between midnight and 6 a.m., when many restaurant and bar workers are driving home from evening shifts.
Tips for Managing Burnout
While the World Health Organization recently classified “burnout” as an occupational phenomenon, it is essential to remember that burnout is not a medical condition. This means your staff can’t get a doctor’s note to tell you that they are burnt out and require rest. Restaurant owners and managers don’t get to do this either. You’ll need to monitor both yourself and your staff for the telltale burnout signs and take action before they become unmanageable.
We’ve highlighted five key steps to managing burnout in restaurants.
Transition to a Pooled House
Sharing the workload is the most obvious way to reduce burnout in a restaurant, but workload sharing can be tricky in tipped work environments. The typical restaurant calls for each server to keep the tips they receive for themselves, minus a percentage that they tip out to bussers, hosts and bartenders. In this model, servers do not typically share tips with other servers.
A pooled house is different. Servers put all their tips in a single, shared pool. That pool is evenly divided amongst the staff, following a predesigned, preapproved equation. A pooled house allows managers and owners to move staff around to manage burnout without affecting the servers’ tips.
Some states have strict laws about tip pooling, so be sure to check your state’s laws before making the transition.
Tip out the Back of House
Adding a tip out to your BOH provides extra compensation to your cooks during busy services. It will not alleviate all of their stress, but knowing that their work will be rewarded makes it easier to push through large orders and push through rushes.
If your restaurant claims a tip credit and pays your tipped workers less than federal minimum wage, the Fair Labor Standards Act prohibits you from including BOH workers in a tip pool. But if you pay all of your workers the full federal minimum wage, you may allow a tip out to the BOH. However, some states have more restrictive labor laws that prohibit tipping employees that do not directly interact with customers. Check your local labor laws to ensure your tip plans are legal in your area.
Alternatively, you can add a 2% to 3% service charge to your checks and distribute those fees to your BOH team. Service charges, not gratuities, are the restaurant’s property, and you can use them for whatever you wish. Remember, service charges are taxed differently than gratuities, so check with your accountant to ensure you correctly report these monies.
Become Employee Focused
“The customer is always right” is an old-fashioned phrase. It has established a working environment in which restaurant staff are pinned between managers and customers. This dynamic must change. Owners and managers must support their workers to help keep employees from burnout and manage their burnout when it eventually occurs.
In a recent survey of burnt-out workers, 26% of respondents said that a more supportive manager would help reduce their burnout. Here are a few helpful strategies for restaurant managers to support their staff.
During service hours, managers and owners can be present in the dining room. With all the added protocols and procedures associated with dining during COVID-19—such as mask mandates and, in certain cities, vaccine requirements—managers and owners should be the ones enforcing these safety measures with customers instead of servers.
An added benefit of being present in the dining room is that you will get a read on each guest’s attitude before service. Low-level problem guests should be flagged for the service staff. You should show high-level problem guests the door immediately. There is simply too much at stake to cater to guests who will not be kind, civil and cooperative.
Enforce Break Time
One of the best ways to manage burnout is by giving staff, and yourself, a break. Enforce is a strong word, but breaks are essential for your team to release any built-up tension. Labor standards require employees to take breaks. But in restaurants, these are often missed (especially among tipped workers who fear that leaving the floor for a few minutes will cost them tips).
You don’t have to stop at the mandatory minimums here. Whenever there is a lull in the shift, let your staff take turns resting for a few minutes off the floor. Do the same for yourself, your cooks and your managers. A quick five or ten minutes to sit down and drink a glass of water can go a long way to improving energy levels and emotional outlook.
If burnout is a more serious issue on your team, consider closing for one day per week. In that employee burnout survey, 30% of burnt-out staff said that reducing their hours worked would relieve their burnout. Take a look at your numbers and close on the day that is historically your slowest day of the week. This will give everyone some time to rest.
Another option is to close for a whole week every six months. This time doesn’t have to be wasted. You can schedule long-delayed maintenance or repairs during these dark weeks.
Have a Family Meal
Another way to treat burnout is to feed your staff filling and nutritious food at the start of their shift. This tradition of “family meal” was once standard practice in restaurants, and it still is in high-end restaurants throughout the country.
But in many smaller establishments, the family meal has become the victim of cost-cutting measures. A well-fed staff will be a better functioning staff. With nutritious food in their bodies, your staff will be in a better mood, have more energy and be less susceptible to burnout.
Coordinate with your chef and kitchen staff to ensure that everyone is on the same page about family meals. Not every restaurant can afford to have the kitchen make an off-menu staff meal. Your team may also have staggered shifts, so you can’t get everyone around a table at the same time. In these instances, you might prefer to allow your staff to order certain items from the menu. Again, be sure to coordinate with your kitchen staff for any items that are off limits.
For something more interesting than a typical family meal, consider working with a neighboring restaurant. Your kitchen could prepare a shift meal for their staff, and their kitchen prepare one for yours. This trade allows your kitchen staff to eat something they didn’t cook (a huge bonus), gives everyone a little variety and builds meaningful connections within your restaurant community.
One Major Don’t
Managers and owners have often used alcohol to incentivize server sales or reward a busy shift. It can seem innocuous, celebratory or a clever way to get your staff to learn the wine list, but using shift drinks to counteract burnout can backfire.
One of the telltale signs of burnout is substance abuse. Using shift drinks as a reward can make burnout harder to identify. Overindulging may make burnout worse by preventing your team from getting much-needed rest. Restaurant workers already often suffer from high levels of addictions, so shift drinks feed into another problem. Use shift drinks with caution and refrain from relying on them as rewards or incentives.
Bottom Line
Burnout is a fact of life in restaurants. Whether you have it yourself or have seen it in your staff, you shouldn’t blame yourself. The above tips will help you and your team manage burnout, but they won’t completely eradicate it. Some amount of burnout is a given in any customer-facing work.
The important thing is to keep monitoring morale by reassessing and reestablishing burnout prevention and management. Once you know what it is and how to spot it, you can manage burnout and keep it from tanking your business.
