Employees
One of the most important decisions and quite often the biggest headache is choosing the right staff for your bar. Your staff are the people who will carry the public and human face of your business. They will interact with your customers and customers will judge you and your business depending on the success of the customer and staff relationship. You will rely on staff to be at work on time, to be appropriately attired (i.e. not coming in looking like they just finished up at a 4-day rock festival) and to be interested in their job enough to care about how this might affect you and the success of your business.
Selecting your staff is a very important step but in reality it is not so much the staff you choose as how you choose to deal with them that will eventually determine whether you are running a successful staff policy or whether your staff turnover is higher than the government cabinet. Staff are complicated, we know this because we are also human. In the same way there are many different way to deal with humans in our everyday lives, the same also applies to staff. It is up to you how you treat your staff but generally it boils down to a mix of loyalty, fairness and discipline. Getting the right mix is the key to keeping good staff and allowing your customers to build a profitable relationship with them.
One of the biggest problems that face managers when dealing with staff is actually dealing with their own personality in such a way to appear in charge while allowing the staff to feel like they are not living in a dictatorship. You have invested your money in this business and you are quite entitled to protect that investment even at the expense of other people’s feelings, you may find that allowing your staff some latitude to moan and whinge will actually allow them to get stuff off their chest and keep them happy. It is up to you to decide whether the issue they are discussing is a genuine problem that may need to be addressed or if the complaint is a by-product of general unhappiness with the staff members personal life or relationships. In all cases hear your staff out because listening to their complaints in a sympathetic manner can solve 90% of problems in itself. If the problem is not something that is within your power to fix, then quite often listening and doing nothing can also fix the problem!
Most importantly reward your staff if they deserve it. Appreciation of effort, where they have gone that little bit further for you, is the single most effective form of boosting your staff morale. Subconsciously staff will expect to be rewarded on a regular basis, you don’t have to lavish them with gifts and money, even just buying them a drink every now and then or giving them an hour or two off when not expected can all help to keep staff happy and with the feeling that their efforts for your business are not going unnoticed.