Check Please! Servers’ Choice of Speediness vs Sales and the Significance for Staffing

The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics lists the median annual wage of waiters and waitresses to be $18,590. With this in mind, one would assume that servers would welcome any opportunity to upsell their customers in order to raise income. But a new study recently published by Cornell Hospitality Quarterly found that restaurant employees are more likely to focus on getting their patrons out faster during peak workload hours rather than use the chance to suggest additional menu items to increase their tips. What causes this to happen? What can it mean for restaurant staffing decisions? Authors Fangyun (Tom) Tan and Serguei Netessine explore these questions in their article “The Implications of Worker Behavior for Staffing Decisions: Empirical Evidence and Best Practices” from Cornell Hospitality Quarterly.

The abstract:

Restaurant employees adjust their sales efforts and service speed as more tables are filled and the workload increases. A study of five casual-dining restaurants finds that when the overall workload is low, as guest traffic begins to pick up and the restaurant becomes busy, the servers step up their game by redoubling their sales efforts through suggestive selling and upselling. Once the workload hits a certain level, however, the servers dial back on selling, take steps to shorten meal duration, and focus primarily on service speed. This inverted-U relationship between employee workload and performance holds both in terms of the number of tables and diners that a server concurrently handles. One implication of this analysis is that restaurants may be overstaffed because the employees’ extra effort meant their workload threshold was not reached in the restaurants being studied. Because of the phenomenon of increased employee effort, this chain could reduce its staffing level on average of one worker per shift while still achieving higher sales. An estimated 3 percent increase in sales would result from servers’ increased sales efforts, which occur until the trigger point is reached and employees focus only on speedy service. This article is based on a paper presented at the 2013 Quality in Service Conference (QUIS).

Read “The Implications of Worker Behavior for Staffing Decisions: Empirical Evidence and Best Practices” from Cornell Hospitality Quarterly for free by clicking here. Want to keep up with all the latest from Cornell Hospitality Quarterly? Click here to sign up for e-alerts!