Always Have A Succession Plan
So we see the year come to an end. With it came Christmas parties, end-of-year get togethers, family catch-ups, general booze ups for the festive season, Christmas carols, holiday celebrations, new years eve parties and any other excuse that all savvy food & beverage outlets could come up with to drive business.
With this extra business of course comes drunken secretaries, booze fuelled labourers, half-pint-Harry’s, intoxicated mums that haven’t drank in 6 months but decided the 3rd glass of champagne was the best choice at the time?, cheesy one-liners and all the other juicy bits that we are privileged to see occur on the other side of the bar.
What it also brings is the open betting market for staff departures. With high levels of trade & the need to work all holidays, comes extra stress, longer hours and that feeling of missing out on all the good things that non-hospitality staff do at this time of year. This is where the betting market comes in. I will bet you that at least one staff member will go at the back end of the busy season, if not a few. The market is, which one?
As my role is overseeing the food & beverage department of a venue I have been fortunate to be able to use this knowledge to prepare for the upcoming departures. It is my philosophy that I should never be scared to lose anybody. If I am I am not doing my job properly. We should focus on sharing responsibilities across the team. A venue should never be reliant on a single person or persons.
I lose a lot of sleep thinking about how we will continue to grow and improve while losing key staff along the way. This is where systems, procedures & a succession plans come in. Losing sleep comes with management, dealing with these issues well makes you a manager, and being a good manager includes, among many other things, implementing or following systems & procedures and creating a succession plan for the venue. It is important to remember that you don’t have to reveal your succession plan, just have one. It is amazing how much more confident you can become in your management decisions when the team is in place to deal with loss.
I can feel I am about to embark on the inevitable end of season staff merry-go-round. I hope I have all my bases covered and hope that all managers out there have planned for theirs.
