How to Identify and Prevent Pencil Whipping in Restaurants
Learn the root causes of pencil whipping in restaurant operations to prevent, identify, and correct pencil whipping.
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You could call daily checklists the building blocks of all restaurant operations. These forms let your in-store staff know what work needs to be done, help above-store leaders better support your locations, and contribute to creating an in-store experience that keeps guests coming back.
While putting together a checklist sounds easy, creating a really good one–one that in-store staff won’t pencil-whip and above-store staff can use to improve store performance–takes some thought. Whether you prefer digital or paper checklists, these 5 tips will help you build the checklists that make it easy for all your locations to operate like your best store.
1. Give each checklist a purpose.
Every checklist should support work that’s critical to the success of your business. That means each checklist should have a clear goal, whether that’s how to open for the day or check food temperatures. If your checklists don’t have a purpose, they can feel like busy work, which increases the chances your staff will rush through them or pencil-whip.
2. Design your checklists with in-store and above-store teams in mind.
Ask yourself what day-to-day success looks like for in-store teams and what data you need your above-store teams to be able to review. Use those answers to guide the type and number of checklists you need and what questions you should be asking.
3. Make your checklist questions as clear as possible.
Use simple language, link to instructions on digital forms if anything needs clarifying, and avoid leading questions. Each question should address one task. If you want more information about a task, include follow-up questions to gather that data. This helps increase the chances work gets done and gets done right.
4. Keep questions simple so you can get easy-to-analyze data.
You can do this in a few ways. Set up your questions to have “yes” and “no” answers to help you quickly see what’s a pass (“yes”) and what’s a fail (“no”). Use static fields as much as possible because multiple-choice answers can make it harder to identify problem areas. And finally, consider enabling formulas to automate data analysis. Your above-store will be able to identify possible problem areas faster and coach your lower-performing locations on how to improve.
5. Bring your company’s “why” into your forms.
Understanding how your checklists tie into the company’s overall goals can help motivate in-store staff and improve task completion rates. For example, if part of your guest experience is always having warm bread always ready, you could add that to your opening checklist before questions that relate to preparing that item.
With these tips, it’s easy to build strong checklists for your staff that also help your bottom line.
Checklists can do more than support your in-store and above-store staff. When your checklists are clear and tied to your company’s goals and values, you increase the likelihood that you can deliver a great guest experience across all your locations, which will positively impact your bottom line.
To learn more about how your business can use digital checklists to improve store performance, explore our operations execution platform, Zenput by Crunchtime.
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