Accountability is the Missing Ingredient

The Power of Accountability

In our last blog post, we talked about motivating your employees and how it positively impacts the culture at your restaurant. When your employees are motivated, they have a desire to work hard to produce great results. Motivated employees also understand the importance of accountability within a team.

“Understanding the true meaning of accountability makes us strong and enables us to learn.” - Sameh Elsayed

If your employees have never been held accountable before, it can take some adjusting to get used to it.

Difference Between Accountability & Blaming Others

  • Accountability: you are responsible for your assigned tasks and seeing them through. When something goes wrong, the accountable parties explain why things have gone as unplanned because they’re knowledgeable in this area.  
  • Blaming: Blaming is when you discipline people and provide penalty toward them. When people are blamed, they have a tendency to get defensive and feel a sense of shame.

Why Accountability is Important

Holding your employees accountable is the opposite of blaming them. Holding them accountable means that they're responsible for their assigned tasks, and when something goes awry they're the ones who provide an explanation.

“If you are building a culture where honest expectations are communicated and peer accountability is the norm, then the group will address poor performance and attitudes.” - Henry Cloud

As a business owner, it’s more important to understand the cause of why an incident happened versus understanding what happened. The “why” explains the underlying roots of the issue, and once you know the “why” you can develop a plan to resolve the issue.

Healthy cultures have accountability threaded into them and people learn to own up to their mistakes. Not only do they acknowledge that there was a mishap, but they try to be apart of the solution.

Empower Employees - Don't Shame Them

Empowering your employees means that you believe in them to accomplish their tasks, but it doesn’t mean that you shame them for mistakes. Mistakes are inevitable, they’re apart of life. Many times, your employees will make mistakes with no ill intent.There is a difference between ill intent and not knowing what is expected of them.

“Responsibility equals accountability equals ownership. And a sense of ownership is the most powerful weapon a team or organization can have." - Pat Summitt

When no ill intent is involved, this is where positive coaching has to be done. You start  to ask them about what happened, why it happened, and it starts to become an educational moment.

Now your employees are apart of understanding what accountability means, and you should send them off with the confidence to crush it now that they know what is expected of them. When you empower your employees, their morale and ability to believe to believe in themselves increases.

Top 3 Ways Hoptix Can Breed A Culture of Accountability

  1. Use hoptix720 to provide learning opportunities- use the video footage to show employees examples of mistakes made, and work together to form solutions on how to improve.  
  2. Establish goals for your employees to reach-  create expectations for your employees, make sure that these are realistic and attainable. You want to set your employees up for success.
  3. Provide team incentive programs- give your employees an incentive when they reach those specific goals. When they attain the goals you gave them, reward them.

Hoptix720 is a positive tool to use in your restaurant. Your employees should be feeling good about implementing this system. Not only will your employees get better over time with being accountable, but it will breed a culture of responsibility in your restaurant.