Empowered to do something different and specific
The waiter in the first anecdote had to overhear the conversation between father and daughter, understand the dynamics at the table, and then had to be empowered to gift them the free bottle of wine. The wait staff in the second anecdote had to rely on an understanding of the customer across restaurants in the same F&B group. Neither were accidental.
What HR practices creates such a system?
a synergistic set of human resource management practices involving three key practices: selection of employees based on emotional capabilities, respectful treatment of employees, and management through a simple set of rules that stimulate complex and intricate behaviours benefiting customers
Simulation of scenarios
There, they simulated difficult situations that managers would have to deal with on a day-to-day basis:
Formalising Danny’s intuitive practices helped USH scale their operations to an empire of incredibly successful restaurants.
Incentive-motivated behaviours
To reiterate: whenever you find behaviour that deviates from a set of mainstream incentive-motivated behaviours, you should probably take a closer look. In this case, what you’ll find is a set of interlocking systems that together creates a rather different set of incentives — a set of incentives that, if Meyer would have you believe it — resulted in a remarkable restaurant business.
How to train unskilled labour for scaling businesses
I had caught my old boss’s implied point about the training SOPs immediately — it meant that these businesses had found a solution for the F&B labour problem, by standardising around dead simple playbooks, tuned for unskilled labour.