Keeping Employees Off Their Phones

One of the many challenges in running a commercial kitchen is keeping my employees engaged and focused on their tasks. One important question to consider when dealing with people is to ask: who is my audience? At Chick-Fil-A in the Concord Mall, most of our employees are high school kids. Being myself a high school kid just a few years ago, is helpful in knowing what and how to keep them engaged. One of the biggest roadblocks in productivity is cell phone use. These kids will jump at any chance they get to pull out their phones for a brief second. Every second spent not focused on the task at hand is a second of wasted labor, a second of wasted time, and a second later we leave every night. Although this may seem minuscule, if you multiply this by the actual time spent on phones while on the clock with the amount of people doing it, it adds up. Time is money, and time on cell phones translates to wasted time in the kitchen, and wasted money.

One way we attempt to limit this problem is to uphold and enforce our rules regarding cell phone use. The rule in the policy book is that cell phones must not be on the employees’ person. Although this is an effective way of counteracting the problem, I’v found that we have been soft on enforcing this rule. To keep productivity high, the leadership team needs to get back to enforcing these rules on a consistent basis.