Objective Logistics Rewards the Best Service Employees with More Tips and Better Shifts
Americans tend to eat about five meals per week in restaurants. But how often do you go to a restaurant and vow never to return because of bad service? Some food service industry businesses fail based on the personalities of their servers rather than the quality of the food being served. For the business owners, this can feel like an unearned failure, which is why it’s important to make good decisions when hiring employees.
And this isn’t some tightly-kept trade secret. Customers know this and business owners know this. Customers are more likely to return if they’re treated well. Therefore, business owners — especially those in the service industry — have a remarkable incentive to retain highly performing service workers by rewarding them with desirable shifts and, especially in the case of food service, more generous financial bonuses.
Objective Logistics, an innovative company in the broad category of gamification startups, is offering a service to restaurants that rates and manages servers in the food service industry. Backed by Google Ventures, Objective Logistics is poised to revolutionize the food service back end by giving desirable shifts and bigger tips to the best performing employees.
The software platform Objective Logistics is running on, dubbed “MUSE” creates a competitive environment in which service staff compete against one another for real-life rewards. According to the Objective Logistics website, one of the biggest factors in employee happiness — and thus reduction in job turnover — is getting the right shifts. By rewarding highly performing employees with desirable shifts, the best performers are more likely to be retained.
So why is this system projected to be so successful? Because there are no losers. People who aren’t happy in their current position are likely to be the same people who under-perform. No one likes to be useless. Those are the people more likely to find a position elsewhere. As for the high performers, they’re rewarded. Businesses thrive because customers are interacting with great staff, and customers are happy and are more likely to be potential returning patrons.
MUSE can be applied to any industry but currently it’s being released at a few restaurants in the Boston area as a beta run. The system, however, could easily apply to many different industries and help coordinate scheduling, shifts, and employee performance rewards for businesses across sectors.
Would you use a system like MUSE for a small business? Or do you think there’s more benefit in having a human being track performance and scheduling issues?
Flickr Image by sansumbrella
I’m curious as to how performance is measured. Customer feedback? How many times they check to see if your drink needs refilled?
Good question, so to rephrase the question what kind of KPI (key performance indicators) are used to measure this and how frequently. I know of some places they use mystery diners, but that is only on a weekly base.