In this contributed post, Andrew Call of eTundra’s The Backburner discusses why restaurant owners and managers need to evaluate their people management skills when assessing poor employee performance. Andrew offers some restaurant management tips including the importance of consistent communication and strong leadership.

Owning and operating a restaurant is as daunting as it is promising. For both the new restaurateur and the seasoned professional the daily ins and outs can get [...]

Ah, the most un-wonderful time of the year (excluding tax-filing time) — the dreaded annual employee review. Despised and avoided by many, the employee appraisal process is often viewed as mandatory yearly assault that delivers little or no value.

In fact, some would say that that the negative outweighs the positive in terms of frustration, stress and diminished morale (Hey, I deserve a higher rating than that!)

Maybe it is worse than tax time.

How do you eliminate [...]

The goal of coaching and feedback is to help employees be their best. One of the best ways managers can do this is to engage employees in discussions about their performance to help them arrive at deeper self-awareness.

So what do you do when an employee has a worldview of their performance that has nothing to do with your reality?

Ignore their perspective, and your ROI on the conversation is the equivalent of talking to a government [...]

What do you know about Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation? Well that fancy-schmancy physics term is more commonly known by the acronym - LASER.

Metaphorically speaking, laser beams and organization-centric goal management (and there’s no acronym for that!) are amazingly similar.

Picture how a laser beam works:

When all the light waves from a given source come together so that that they’re all in phase, we end up with (you guessed it) a laser beam. And when [...]

Is it any wonder HR gets a bad rap as a paper pusher?

“Fill in the job application… Complete the open enrolment form… The leave request form is on the intranet…. Did you sign off that you’ve read the employee handbook? Now about that TPS report cover…”

(OK that last one’s a joke for you Office Space fans.)

It’s no one’s fault. Forms are a part of our day-to-day lives and exist in almost any working environment. And yes, [...]