The Collaborative Power of the Roadhouse Service Group
By Zachary Milner
Hey everyone!
It’s been almost a month since I’ve been able to write to you on how well your favorite Roadies are doing since the renovations! I’ve missed you all quite a bit, and am honored to get back on the every-other-week saddle as we dive into another edition of the Gazette, where I take you all behind the scenes of how things get done at Zingerman’s Roadhouse, where managers’ heads (and hearts) are at, and tackling tough topics as we go along.
So a top question you may have at this time is, “Zach, you guys have been reopened for a month now, how’s it been going??” My gut manager response, to pull you behind the curtain as I promised you I’d do, is simply Natural Law of Business #9: Success means you get better problems. Having a new space to serve our fabulous guests brings joy, and that joy is complex indeed. The space is absolutely beautiful…but quite different spatially for us. This means we’ve had to trial and error our way into setting new routines and new systems. Who sets those standards? How do those standards get set? Here at Zingerman’s, we have a unique approach with how we wrestle with this, and personally, I love the method to the madness.
About our Roadhouse Service Group
To answer the aforementioned questions, the first stop on our journey of discovery is to introduce you to our amazing Roadhouse Service Group meetings. Since about 2011, every week on Thursday, staff from every department are invited to come together for an hour and a half to discuss all things going on in the restaurant and bring up things folks have noticed that need improvement. I pulled a snapshot of these meetings from the vision I wrote on bringing these back after they fell off during the pandemic:
These meetings have been an amazing source of honest, engaging, and dignity-honoring conversation. All the FOH (front of house) staff have really appreciated and enjoyed how much we’ve leaned on managing in our known open book style, as we’ve been 100% devoted to making the Roadhouse the best restaurant it can be, both to work at and to give great service from. Whenever we have proposed changes to anything FOH, by either formal leadership or the rest of the team, we bring it to this group to hash out and ask for honest opinions. This is the main purpose of this group, as we strive for clear transparency and to make real changes we can all get behind!
We typically get representation from the Roadshow, servers, service assistants, and bartenders to help us hash out how to make the best changes possible. What better group to bring all the new spatial changes than this one? Diversity of thought is key to the success of ANY business, and surely ours is no different.
We recently have hashed out topics pertaining to:
- How many silverware bins?
- Which servers breakdown and clean what side stations?
- Who manages the new high top tables in the bar room?
- Where do we have our staff preshift?
- Where do our Toast handhelds go to charge at night?
- Who restocks all the takeout containers?
Real Collaboration leads to Real Change
As you can see, there are many small details that truly matter quite a bit! The only way to manage them correctly, as far as I can tell, is to come to consensus, via collaboration, with the folks actually doing the work every day and get on the same page. Back when I was a service assistant here at the Roadhouse, Service Group was my way into seeing what REAL open book management is like, and how we tie in servant leadership into it all. These meetings are what inspired me to become a manager in the first place. They’re at the core of what we believe and do, as REAL change happens here that affects the restaurant in ways even you fine folks reading this can feel.
All things considered, I reflect on Service Group with this: It’s beautiful to work in a space that naturally has collaboration at the forefront. It’s the kind of work that is incredibly rewarding to dedicate yourself to, as it honors the humanity in each and every person.
I really appreciate you folks who stopped their lives for a few minutes to read! Keeping on this theme, in a couple weeks, let’s revisit this topic on collaboration and how we maintain systems that Service Group helps us create. Until then, may we cross paths at the Roadhouse or Roadshow, and may our paths crossing come with warm smiles…and hopefully I am bringing something tasty with me to share!