Pizza Express Waitress
Experience
After finishing my first year at university I returned to Pizza Express as a waitress and have also been working occasionally in term time as well. At the end of 2021 a whole set of new management took over the restaurant that I work at, giving me the opportunity to work with a new team and see a different approach to managing staff. Before even meeting the new Restaurant Manager, she decided to give me the opportunity to run a shift by myself as a Manger on Duty (MOD).
Role included:
- Opening the restaurant- setting up for the shift, opening all the tills, changing stock on the tills, starting everyone’s money belts.
- Creating a section plan and delegating tasks for the change-over jobs. Planning when breaks will start and finish.
- Welcomed customers at the door and seated them, explaining the process of service and ensuring their waiter/waitress knew of their presence.
- Assisting anyone who was struggling with their tables, ensuring the restaurant stayed as clean and tidy as possible and being on hand to resolve any issues that arose.
- Ensured all breaks were given and change over jobs were completed.
I was proud of myself for completing this shift without full training as it went very smoothly without any big issues from customers. However, I did learn a lot from this shift, especially the importance of understanding the abilities of your employees. Due to there being a lot of new staff I had never met, I didn’t understand most of their capabilities which did lead to someone getting a little overwhelmed with their tasks assigned, this was resolved by assigning some of their tables to an older waitress with more experience. I now know it is important to get to know your staff and if I am unsure, it is good to ask others.
Skills
Leading Team Briefings.
Before the start of any shift,
it is important to have a team
briefing to ensure all staff are aware of
what is expected throughout the day and if
there are any stock issues. I have regularly led these team briefings, not only when I ran a shift as MOD, but also when I have opened as a waitress. To develop my team briefing skills I read an article called ‘Problems with Team Briefing in Practice’ (Marchington, Parker and Prestwich, 1989). Although this journal is old it made a lot of good points to consider when leading a team briefing, including how they can prevent misunderstanding and increase commitment. Understanding the issues of team briefings is a good step to ensure that I develop the skills to create informative, more effective team briefings. From this journal I have learnt to make sure to start briefings with the good aspects, and celebrate the hard work
of staff instead of going
straight in to how
to improve.
Measuring Customer
Satisfaction.
Customer satisfaction and loyalty are
key differentiators between the better
and poorer performing businesses in most markets. Satisfaction drives loyalty and loyalty drives business performance (Hill, Brierley, and MacDougall, 2017). Whilst working at Pizza Express I have always made sure to check my feedback from customers, to ensure that I can make any amends needed to improve my service. The customers give feedback through a service online called ‘How did we dough?’, this allows them to rate the overall service and give specific feedback to their waiter/waitress. I think that this service is useful, as it allows the team to see what areas are going well and what to improve on and gives the customer an opportunity to win a
prize as a leverage to
complete the feedback.
Staff Recriuitment.
Holbeche, 2004, states ‘Ask
leaders what their biggest challenge is,
and you get the same answer: finding
attracting and keeping talented people. Ask talented people that what their biggest career challenge is, and you will hear the same refrain: finding good people to work with - and to work for.’ (as cited in Shafique, 2012). There is always the need for new staff in restaurants and so I decided to have my manager take me through the interview process for Pizza Express. It was interesting to see how they promote the roles needed and the initial application process online, as it has changed a bit since I first stated there. We then discussed what they look for in potential candidates, areas such as communication and previous experience were included in this list, and willingness to learn was something very sought after by the team. There is a list of questions that must be asked during an interview but deviating to further understand the candidate often takes place. To further develop my recruitment knowledge,
I would ask to sit in on interviews in the future, which will help me to fully
understand the process, both
before and after.
