For years almost all of the problems we’ve had at the restaurant have resulted from rumour and gossip.
We don’t have many strict rules, but one of them is that if you want to discuss another team member unless it is to say how well they are doing, you have to be willing to repeat what you are saying with that person present. If you are not, then we don’t want to hear it.
People discussing remuneration has been one of the recurring issues.
I’ve been toying with the idea of putting a list on the wall showing everyone’s remuneration with a note explaining why there is differentiation in the rates. each time I’ve discussed this with team members or professionals I was told this was a bad idea.
After researching what great Scrum companies do and listening to Jeff Sutherland and talking to Joe Justice, I’ve decided to take it a step further.
Here’s what I have decided to do:
My first list of making work visible
- Share my vision openly with the world through this site and through a vision board which will be a series of epics written on post-it notes and put on the wall at the restaurant. This will be in a prominent place where customers and team members will be able to see it. I will write these in the form of a Product Backlog Story, “As a customer I want ………….. so that …………….”, If I can’t put it into the perspective of a) a customer or b) a team member, I probably won’t include it.
- I will make our accounts public and encourage the team to read them and teach them how to understand what the numbers mean.
- Publish all salaries so all can see.
- I had a thought yesterday about creating an ascending remuneration package where every team member is trained to do every job in the restaurant. it will lead to an ultimate qualification called “Restaurant Owner” where the team member will have enough information to open and run a restaurant from scratch. when they reach that point they will be entitled to a full share of the profits and before that, they will be entitled to a scaled down amount dependant on how much knowledge they have of the various roles. There’s something great that comes out of knowing all of the jobs in your business, it enables you to make better decisions and it enables you to do any of the jobs you undertake better.
