How Do You Pave the Way While Still Meeting the Challenges Posed by a Global Pandemic?
COVID-19 changed the perspective on quality and risk in the restaurant industry overnight. Now you must think about viral spread and building customer trust more than ever before, and you must find ways to ensure employees are carrying out new initiatives without traditional means of assessing compliance. This has been a hectic time, with many restaurants implementing new sanitation or curbside pickup procedures on the fly.
Now that we’re six months in, and restaurants have started looking for longer-term solutions, I have seen promising trends in quality management development. I believe restaurants can use this to rethink their quality and risk programs in a way that does more than simply dust off the old model of quality audits, especially at the location level. This is an opportunity to modernize quality management and, for the restaurants who take it, I see the future of quality emerging from this pandemic.
How do you pave the way for that future while still meeting the challenges posed by a global pandemic? It’s time to embrace technology in your quality management process.
Allow Self-Assessments to Provide Insight
For decades, restaurants (and most companies) have placed heavy emphasis on the results of annual assessments at each location. This made sense in a pre-digital era. Collecting frequent self-assessments was difficult and time consuming. Sending auditors out to visit every location, every year provided visibility into the health of the business that you couldn’t get any other way.