With summer here, preparations are needed to ensure you have a busy yet successful period for your family entertainment centre.
Over the summer, there’s plenty of opportunity to maximise your guest visits. But when your target market is out by the beach, pool, out of town, or deep in other social plans, it can be unproductive at the venue. It’s a good idea to plan for this, giving your staff opportunities to enjoy their summer while ensuring that morale and productivity are still high.
Here are some of our tips to keep employees focused and motivated in the lead-up to summer:
1. Lead by example.
One of the easiest steps, but often the most overlooked. Are you behaving the same way you want your employees to? Are you on time for work, taking the break times when you should, and staying until closing? Attitude-wise, are you maintaining an enthusiastic approach to your work and your staff? Behaviour is infectious, so it’s up to you to set the standard of how everyone should act in the venue, busy season or otherwise.2. Plan the roster!
Encourage time off to be taken in the next couple of weeks or months, so employees have the time to embrace summer. Within the summer period, make sure your team has enough notice of the specific weeks and days they can or cannot take vacation leave. While you are organising the roster, remember to be attentive to scheduling. Look back at last year to assess how busy you were during the season. With people going on holidays or taking their leave, you will have to be adaptive and stay on the ball. Make sure you’ve adequately rostered staff in accordance with predicted numbers and peak hours.
Smart business intelligence dashboards like STATS enable you to get deep insights into actionable data, like manpower analysis, guest activity, average dwell time, and spending habits. This information will help you better plan your roster for more effective guest and staff management.
3. Incentivise employees.
Many businesses offer extra breaks during busy periods (just an extra 10-15 minutes for a snack or coffee). Think of other ways you can include some perks to work in your business for the season. Summer is usually for events and outdoor fun, which can be incorporated into your own business. Try organising small work events for your team to keep morale up. This doesn’t mean you have to set up a large event every week, but having themed lunches or after-work drinks can go a long way in keeping employees relaxed and motivated in their roles.
With the lull, summer can be a good window of opportunity to brush your staff's skills on customer service, product knowledge, and operational know-how. Dynamic training programmes like Embed GoTrain™ offer both learning and staff bonding. Plus, you can choose from different training tracks in one platform—from in-venue training with a game show component, virtual training, or self-training through the GoTrain™ Learning Hub.
4. Acknowledge a successful year.
Whether you are planning a party, office drinks, or an out-of-office activity day, appreciate your team's hard work and recognise a job well done throughout the busy period. It can be something simple, such as thank-you notes, a personal gratitude email, or a small token. Sometimes, kind words go a long way to motivate and encourage staff.
5. Be understanding.
This may be the most important time of the year for you as a manager to relate to your team and be attentive. Employees may encounter difficult customers or personal situations overwhelming to them. Make sure you are available to handle any issues and smooth over any disruptions to the daily routine. With the added load of extra customers and work, staff can be easily stressed, and smaller problems can become larger issues much more easily than at any other time.
Looking to boost your summertime revenue? Here's how a mobile POS can untether your staff from counters, unlock faster sales, and encourage bigger guest spend.