Updated on: February 8, 2025
The need for a dedicated human resources department becomes all the more apparent during an era that’s recently experienced a newly directed focus on employee development, mental and physical well-being, comfort, and overall satisfaction. This change of approach to the employee/employer relationship caused many organizations to dedicate more effort toward a more efficient HR strategy that sends a clear message of compassion regarding employee wellbeing.
One industry that has seen increased challenges in this area, particularly with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, is the hospitality industry – specifically, the food and restaurant industry. This guide highlights the ins and outs of human resources in the restaurant industry and how to implement and optimize a restaurant HR department within your organization.
What Is Restaurant HR?
On the employee side, restaurant human resources handle various responsibilities related to employee well-being, satisfaction, progression, and conduct. The primary function of a human resources department within any restaurant organization is to assist management or corporate in handling performance management, recruiting, and regulatory compliance.
HR’s responsibilities begin when a prospective employee turns in an application to the last day the company employs the applicant. The knowledge HR has on compliance and employee management helps the restaurant.
The Benefits of a Great Restaurant HR Department
An efficient human resources department has a significant amount of positive influence over the restaurant in which it operates. These benefits include:
Safety
One of the most important tasks of the human resources team is passing knowledge regarding compliance to the kitchen and wait staff. This goes a long way toward helping to avoid potential liability issues derived from employee injury and, most importantly, ensuring the safety of your staff.
Training
Your restaurant should have a uniform training method for the kitchen and wait staff. Human resources can help implement training standards, including compiling manuals and other literature regarding your workflow.
Learn More: The Best Restaurant Training Techniques For Your Restaurant
Morale
Employee morale is one of the essential elements of any organization – especially a business dealing with customers face-to-face and maintaining a positive attitude to keep customers in good spirits. If your employee morale is high, this directly transfers to the customers, allowing them to have a more pleasant experience. Research has repeatedly proven that happy employees are more engaged and focused on performance.
Culture
Your corporate or company culture plays a massive role in the progression and growth of your business. This is especially important if you’re growing a brand with plans to expand or franchise. Developing a healthy corporate culture with benchmarks regarding behavior, conduct, and other elements makes it easier to maintain a specific direction regarding the atmosphere or face of your brand. Human resources will help paint a clearer picture of your organization’s culture, ensuring management and employees drive the right message.
The Consequences of Poor Restaurant HR
Poor restaurant hr can have devastating consequences for any organization that doesn’t focus enough on this department. It’s essential to be aware of the following:
Employee Turnover
Failure to leverage the power of human resources can drastically affect employee turnover rates. This can result from poor morale, an inability to convey the right message through corporate culture, or other detrimental situations.
Learn more: Restaurant Turnover Rates: How to Keep and Develop Quality Employees
Poor Hiring and Training
When your company doesn’t have a uniform training and hiring process, hiring rates suffer. Poor corporate culture also plays a significant role in the hiring and training process—if you’re not sending the right message to new employees, they’ll likely seek employment elsewhere.
Low Customer Satisfaction
Low customer satisfaction is a potential death sentence for any restaurant. Customer satisfaction normally suffers directly without a human resources department to help implement policy and regulatory compliance.
Compliance and Legal Risk
Regulatory compliance is designed to keep customers and employees safe through rules that apply to the entire industry. To monitor employee reactions, adherence to these regulations must constantly be monitored through training sessions, frequent reminders, and random tests or real-life scenarios.
The Role and Responsibilities of HR In a Restaurant
Your human resources department has various duties and roles across your organization. However, several pertinent responsibilities exist to keep your restaurant optimized and running smoothly.
Processing Payroll and Administering Benefits
Human resources are generally in charge of payroll. This includes tracking hours and salaries, factoring and splitting tips, and processing paychecks or direct deposits. This department also handles insurance benefits and works directly with investment firms for 401k and other retirement benefits.
Learn More: How to Organize and Run a Restaurant’s Payroll
Ensuring Local, State, and Federal Regulation Compliance
Employees within human resources must stay on top of how well employees adhere to local, state, and federal compliance. This information helps avoid potential fines and other negative scenarios during compliance visits or inspections. This also allows restaurants to obtain the proper permitting, avoid health code violations, and adhere to the regulations of OSHA.
Learn More: Restaurant Health Code Violations And How to Avoid Them
Creating and Communicating Restaurant HR Policies
The human resources department is responsible for crafting and finding ways to distribute HR policies. Specific areas of focus include:
- Attendance and scheduling are usually HR’s responsibility. They will devise a system and groups of rules regarding attendance policies, infractions, and other issues relating to scheduling.
- Conduct policy is another important topic for human resources. HR should be expected to craft a set of guidelines regarding conduct, in addition to devising consequences or a system keeping track of transgressions.
- Dress and grooming codes are essential, especially in the restaurant business. Customers who eat out want to feel comfortable in a clean environment around others who are presentable. HR must communicate what employees expect regarding expected dress attire and enforce these rules.
- Social media policy has been another critical topic regarding human resources over the last few years. Since social media has blossomed into a powerful advertising platform and a primary method of how companies—especially restaurants—make themselves visible, it’s essential to outline the rules for employee behavior on social media. It must be clear what employees are and aren’t allowed to post about the company.
- Health and safety policies are one of the main focus areas for human resources. HR must communicate what is expected of them regarding safety and health rules. This includes best practices for cooks and wait staff in the kitchen and on the floor. Topics in this category include food preparation and proper temperatures, safety and wet floor signs posted for customers, and general safe food handling.
- Human resources are typically responsible for benefits. Typically, this department compiles benefit options and prepares them for employees. Employees receive this information and have the option of selecting their preferred options. If they have questions about benefit selection, they should always direct them to HR, who will assist appropriately.
Interview and Hiring Policies
Management formulates and passes on interviewing and hiring policies to human resources. These policies include questions during the interview process, onboarding new employees, and ensuring new hires are hired properly.
HR will primarily provide all pertinent information needed for new hires to comfortably and efficiently settle into their new roles. For restaurant HR departments, this could include creating login and password information for POS systems, distributing employee handbooks, and obtaining insurance/benefit information and direct deposit accounts.
Learn More: How to Overcome an Understaffed Restaurant
Managing Employee Schedules Across Locations
This becomes especially important with franchise restaurants, where employees work in more than one location on different days.
Building a Strong Restaurant Culture
Building a solid restaurant culture includes informing employees about their expected conduct and other strict company policies. While this information might be contained in the handbook to a certain degree, it is usually discussed further during team meetings and new employee onboarding.
Leadership and Employee Training
Although managers and official trainers usually conduct hands-on training, HR almost always creates guidelines for exercise that corporate trainers follow. This is important for maintaining a uniform set of practice standards during training. In restaurant training, HR might decide on portions the kitchen staff uses or methods for the wait staff to greet customers.
Learn More: Restaurant Management Training: What You Need to Know
Resolving Employee Conflicts
In any business, employee conflicts are unavoidable. When these things happen, human resources must step in the middle to intervene during these situations. It will be up to HR professionals to decide who receives the punishment and what that punishment might be.
Food Service Certifications
Certificates like ServSafe and other health-related classes are usually made available through human resources. Typically, employees sign up for these classes, and HR decides to enroll each employee. If needed, they might also provide lodging or travel accommodations to and from these classes.
The Components of an Effective Restaurant HR Team
Several essential elements go into constructing a successful HR department. Consider the following areas of importance:
- Defining all critical roles throughout the organization is essential to maintain the best restaurant staff. The following functions must be clearly outlined in the manual and by word of mouth throughout the organization.
- Restaurant Owner. Everyone is clear on who the owner is. While they may not play an outlined daily role, their information should always be available to management in the event of an emergency or other issue.
- Restaurant HR Manager. The HR manager oversees everything that happens daily in the human resources department. This includes how employees conduct their daily activities and the responsibilities of the human resources department.
- Restaurant Manager. The restaurant manager must be accessible to employees at all times. Human resources will clearly define their role and how employees should reach them.
- Team and Shift Leaders. Team and shift leaders are the link between employees and restaurant managers. They resolve any challenges resolved during a shift.
- Restaurant Owner. Everyone is clear on who the owner is. While they may not play an outlined daily role, their information should always be available to management in the event of an emergency or other issue.
Learn More: What Makes the Perfect Restaurant Staff?
Restaurant HR Best Practices and Tips
Human resources should be mindful of the following areas of importance during daily operations:
- Be sure to offer a fair pay grade and benefits that have significant value.
- Don’t wait around too long to hire staff. If a position must be filled, HR should satisfy this issue. This ensures the customer experience doesn’t suffer and employees aren’t overworked.
- Invest in onboarding, training, and developing new employees to ensure you run a smooth, successful operation where rules are clearly defined.
- Always maintain a positive work environment. Morale must be high to ensure engaged employees and a conducive atmosphere for customer satisfaction.
- Don’t downplay any conflicts at work. All incidents must be investigated and addressed.
- Use HR software to save time and resources and streamline all human resource processes.
Learn More: How to Manage a Restaurant
Improving HR by Utilizing Restaurant HR Software
Restaurant HR software makes every process within the human resources department operate fluidly and saves many person-hours that are better used in other areas.
Staff Hiring and Lifecycle Management
Keep track of each employee’s history with the company. Dates hired, career milestones and other areas of focus are tracked effortlessly.
Standardized and Efficient Onboarding and Training
A uniform method of onboarding and training must be developed to guarantee standard practices within your organization. This gives everyone a fair shot at learning the same system and keeps your restaurant to certain standards.
Employee Record Documentation
Most human resource departments are responsible for documenting employee records, including driver’s licenses, certificates, and other necessary documentation.
Integrate Seamlessly for Payroll and Benefits Management
All payroll and benefits are stored and maintained in the system to keep track of all employee benefits. These can easily be pulled for distribution to employees or updating.
Efficient, Secure Team Communications
The software provides a portal for all employees to communicate efficiently and accurately. The communications feature can address all input and questions from employees to HR.
Employee Scheduling
Restaurant scheduling software is an absolute game-changer, particularly when managing the schedules for multiple restaurant locations. It allows you to look up past schedules to help create new programs and keep track of all logged hours.
Regulatory Compliance
All regulatory compliance certificates can be logged and accessed from one simple location. These can be printed so compliance agencies can satisfy requirements.
SynergySuite is available to handle all these jobs and more to assist any human resources department.
