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[mattm]

1) Educate: Spending 15 minutes each week to educate your employees will pay off. Admittedly, not all of your employees will benefit from the education, but enough will to make a big difference in your business. Make sure that your employees understand what increases company profits and what hurts company profits.
2) Measure: The act of measuring productivity increases the productivity by 20% to 30%.

Try it. Pick something that you can measure. Let’s take orange juice sales as an example. Tell your wait staff that you are going to measure and graph the sales of orange juice be each person. Then each day show a simple graph of orange juice sales by person. You should see a 20% to 30% increase in orange juice sales unless you already have a very good system for ensuring that your customers are reminded of orange juice.
3) Empower: Empower your employees to fix problems and come up with ideas to improve efficiency.

Give bonuses to employees in the kitchen that come up with ideas for reducing waste.

Give your wait staff business cards with coupons for free desert to give to customers that either had a problem or were particularly nice or patient. This is cheap advertising and it makes your wait staff feel like they have power to resolve minor customer issues.