Your back-of-house (BOH) employees play a big role in the success of your restaurant. When you engage them more effectively and retain them more consistently, your performance is bound to improve.
BOH digital signage can help you achieve this. We’ll tell you why and let you know how to get started with it in this article.
What is BOH signage?
BOH signage is simply digital signage that you place in your back of house.
If you’re not familiar with it, digital signage is a type of electronic signage that comes equipped with a range of capabilities. Common uses of digital signage include advertising, engagement and internal communications.
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How does digital signage help with employee engagement and retention?
BOH signage is worth adding to your restaurant’s back of house because it provides you with a series of concrete strategies to boost employee engagement and retention.
This is valuable because research shows that engaged teams are 21% more profitable than competitors. If you can retain more of your BOH employees, your team should become increasingly efficient as time goes by, saving you on ongoing and training-related costs.
With that in mind, here are 7 ways that BOH signage can help you boost your employee engagement and retention.
Tap into your employees’ competitive nature
Research suggests that introducing competition into the workplace can boost employees’ performance.
Bringing a competitive element to your back of house is easy with custom signage. You can use it to create, update and share employee leaderboards to boost performance and celebrate achievements. Examples of tracking metrics could include:
- Ingredient prep time
- Completion of training modules or training scores
- Chore completion tracking
- Progress towards daily or weekly sales goals
You can even consider rewarding the hourly worker (or the entire shift) that wins your leaderboard at the end of the month to further boost engagement and motivation.
Bring your team together to pursue a common goal
Research shows that setting specific and challenging goals engages employees and leads to higher performance.
Use BOH signage to remind your team of the goal, exactly what they need to do to meet it and the deadline for doing so. Tracking progress through a real-time chart or infographic can bring a game-like element to more mundane tasks!
Recognize your employees
Data from polls suggests that recognizing individual employees boosts their engagement. Digital signage is the perfect medium to bring this strategy to your restaurant’s back of house.
You can use it to:
- Celebrate important employee milestones (such as their work anniversary or birthday)
- Give praise to hard-working employees for their contributions
- Welcome new hires and celebrate their training progress
Introduce new team members more efficiently
People are always going to be more hesitant to leave a job if they have good friends in the workplace. That means you may be able to cut down on turnover if you can help new employees build relationships with other team members faster.
One way to do that is by introducing team members to existing employees and giving them a bit of their background. That way, your new employee will be able to quickly start bonding with existing team members who share similar interests.
BOH signage makes this much easier to do. You can use your back-of-house screens to welcome new employees, share their roles, experience and interests outside of work.
Doing this should help to bring new team members into the fold faster, which, in turn, should lower your turnover rate.
Ask for your employees’ opinions
Employees are more engaged when they feel valued. And what better way to show your team that you value them than by seeking their opinion?
There’s a lot that you can do in this area by engaging individual team members directly, but it can also be useful to use BOH digital signage to add some automation to this process. This can help to ensure consistency and avoid bias in feedback collection.
You can create BOH displays that feature a QR code that employees can scan to access surveys that they fill out anonymously. This gives your employees the chance to submit their honest feedback without having to worry about it impacting their employment with you.
If you’re going to do this, just make sure that you listen to the results of the surveys that you post. For example, if you get a lot of feedback saying that BOH staff doesn’t enjoy one of your processes, consider following up by introducing a new process to replace it.
You need to act on at least some of the feedback that you receive – ignoring feedback is unlikely to be the value add that you set out to make it be!
Effectively communicate with BOH team members
Communication is a huge part of keeping your team members engaged. Without it, you’ll struggle to disseminate consistent messaging across shifts and lose out on efficiencies.
Digital signage makes it simple to consistently communicate important messages with your back-of-house hourly workers. You can use it to continuously highlight the most important information you want to share with your team and keep messaging consistent across different locations or venues.
Improve training completion rate
Providing ongoing training is another excellent strategy for boosting employee engagement and retention. To be effective with this method, you need a way to ensure that all team members complete their training promptly.
BOH signage makes it possible to display an up-to-date list of employees who haven’t completed their training yet – without having to update paper signs or cross out names.
You can also use BOH signage to create QR code displays that allow training to be completed on a personal device. This can give team members more flexibility with the timing of when they complete their training.
Getting started with BOH signage
If you’re ready to add digital signage to your back of house, you only need a few items to begin:
- Screens in your back of house
- Digital signage software
- Media players (only necessary if your screens can’t connect to the internet on their own)
Once you have all of these things, here are the steps to follow to get started with your BOH signage:
- Set up your screens in locations where employees can easily view them
- Connect your digital signage software to the screens
- Use the software to create displays
- Set up a display rotation through your digital signage software
- Press play to start the rotation
Don’t let these things ruin your progress
BOH signage can be an effective strategy for engaging and retaining your employees – but you likely won’t get as much out of it as you could if you let these potential issues derail your progress.
Failing to adapt
As is the case with any new strategy, it typically takes some tinkering to optimize how you use BOH signage. You don’t want to implement an idea and then just assume that it’ll lead to your desired outcome.
Instead, make sure that you’re regularly checking in on the performance of your BOH signage campaigns. That way, you see when they’re not as effective as you want them to be and you can make changes to solve those inefficiencies.
Only placing screens in out-of-the-way locations
The impact of digital signage can only be realized if your employees can see the displays that you want them to see. The only way to make that happen is to place your screens in locations that are easy for them to view.
Although it may be difficult to find space for a screen in high-traffic areas, doing so can be crucial to the success of your BOH signage.
Picking the wrong digital signage software
The digital signage software that you select will also have a huge influence on how well you’re able to leverage BOH signage to achieve your engagement and retention goals.
If you choose weak software, expect to get weak results from it. That’s why it’s important to look for digital signage software that gives you complete control over both the displays that you create and how they’re shared with your employees.
It’s even better if you pick digital signage software like UPshow that gives you built-in tools for measuring the effectiveness of your back-of-house campaigns.
UPshow makes it easier to engage and retain employees with BOH signage
No matter what your goals with BOH signage are, you’re going to need the right partner to make them happen. UPshow can be that partner.
Our digital signage software provides all of the functionality and customization that you need to:
- Boost revenue
- Reduce employee turnover
- Increase operational excellence
