How to Conduct an Effective Weekly Management Meeting

The weekly management (operations) meeting is an absolute information and innovation machine - the most valuable time for your restaurant in the whole week.

It is a time devoted to the issues surrounding how your business can increase its sales and profits and expand. It is the stage from which you provide direction to your staff, and the training ground for your managers to run the business in your absence.

Or, at least, that's how it should be - and can be - with a little organization and planning. Run correctly, the weekly operations meeting engages your entire team in plans to improve sales, service, guest and employee satisfaction levels.

If the meeting agenda is weak, or the leader is unprepared, however, the time will be used poorly. It may even be counterproductive, becoming a drain on managers, who will become bored, complacent and wonder why they have to come in early to listen to a lecture. This lack of motivation and inspiration will be reflected in poor results in the dining room and bar.

A Recipe for Great Meetings

Begin by preparing a standard, recurring agenda that covers general business topics to discuss every week. Change the content of each topic depending on what is going on in your restaurant. Start with a global message, move on to weekly numbers, and share the efforts of each manager and successes and failures with guests. These first four topics should become a weekly shared overview of the state of your restaurant. Then, go into a more detailed look with the fifth topic.