In 1986, soon after opening, Union Square Cafe in New York City got a two-star rating in the New York Times. In 1989, determined to bring his restaurant up to three-star status, co-owner Danny Meyer developed Operation Excellence, a program in which he gave employees vouchers to eat at the restaurant and critique it. "The whole point was to see what we could do to elevate Union Square Cafe to three stars, the point of excellence," says Meyer, who also co-owns Gramercy Tavern, Eleven Madison Park and Tabla in New York City.

The restaurant received the prestigious three-star rating, and Meyer discovered an untapped resource right under his nose: his staff. "We thought this would be a one-shot deal," he says. "But the response was so positive we decided to extend it to how we do business all the time."

Today, all of Meyer's staff members who have been employed by him for more than 90 days receive a voucher once a month to dine at any one of his four restaurants. In return, they must fill out a preprinted, three-page comment form critiquing everything from the initial front-door greeting to portion sizes to the wine list. The completed forms are read and reviewed by the individual restaurant's management staff.

Employees have responded positively to the program, says Meyer. They take their critiquing task seriously, suggesting everything from big-picture to minute changes to improve a customer's experience. "One staff member ate at Union Square and said there was nowhere to hang her purse at the bar. Now we have hooks under the bars for guests to hang a purse," he says.

Meyer is just one restaurateur who has found that some of the best suggestions come from employees. Furthermore, asking employees for their input can help boost morale, potentially increasing employee retention. "This is the strongest thing we do in terms of improvement. Having an engaged team helps us improve ourselves and makes the employee feel invested in the process," says Meyer. "If an employee is in a position of making suggestions that will help the restaurant improve, what can be better than that?"

A penny for your thoughts

Putting employees' suggestions to work often is easier said than done. Sometimes a simple suggestion box is enough to garner thoughts and ideas, but some employees may need an incentive to voice their opinions.

At The Great Impasta in Brunswick, Maine, owner Alisa Coffin encourages employees to be proactive in making suggestions — she offers a $25 bonus to anyone whose idea is implemented by the restaurant. "A lot of times employees will think of something, then they get busy," she says. "But then they think, 'Oh, yeah, I want to tell her this or that and get $25.' It encourages them to follow through. It's a real simple idea: Give me a suggestion, and here's $25."

In 1998 and 1999, Back Yard Burgers Inc. sponsored the What's for Lunch program, which encouraged employees to submit recipes for their favorite foods cooked from products available in the restaurant's kitchen. More than 50 employees sent in ideas to the company's Memphis, Tennessee, headquarters. The company awarded cash prizes to the creators of the top six recipes. Charles Atkins, a Back Yard Burgers employee from Asheville, North Carolina, was the 1998 winner with his "Fajita Chicken Sandwich" — chicken breast, salsa, sour cream, cheddar cheese, purple onion and lettuce on a toasted bun — which is now featured on the menu in the restaurant's 93 units.

"We created a fun and interesting way to get feedback from the people serving our product every day," says Chris Allison, president of The Allison Agency, Back Yard Burger's advertising firm. "It helps us to get feedback from the most important people we should be talking to, next to the customers."

When employees know that their opinions are important to management and receive rewards for their suggestions, it can boost employee morale, says Coffin. "They feel that their input — their ideas — are worth something both financially and with management," she says. And that could translate into employees staying on the job longer. "Good morale, in general, helps with retention. It's a trickle-down effect."

Beyond the suggestion box

Employee meetings offer another way to solicit staff suggestions. Once a month, Juniper, Florida-based RJ Gator's Hometown Grill and Bar conducts a suggestion-seeking meeting at each of its 11 units. "We call them the 'make-it-better' meetings," says Tim Timoteo, CEO and founder. At each meeting, a representative from each department meets with the restaurant's manager to discuss bottlenecks, ways to improve the current system and any problems between departments. "I want my employees to feel it's OK to tell management about a problem and know that the messenger doesn't get killed. That's how we get feedback," he says.

Timoteo also hosts a dinner quarterly, where one employee per restaurant is invited to sit down and talk with "Mr. T." "I find out a lot of things here," says Timoteo. "They tell me ideas — I don't even have to ask them." A bartender, for example, talked about how there's no hostess in the middle of the afternoon at one particular unit — leaving the greeting responsibility to bartenders. But a T-shirt case blocked the hostess stand from the bar, the bartender pointed out. "We cut a hole on either side of the case so the bartender could look through and greet guests," says Timoteo. "It looks good, and we didn't even think of it."

Likewise, employees at Portland, Oregon's Pazzo, which is a member of the San Francisco-based Kimpton Hotel and Restaurant Group, gather monthly for the Employee Action Committee (EAC), where they meet with management to discuss how the restaurant can run more smoothly. Employees talk about everything from having more in-house stock of certain items to using a different type of glass for custard desserts. "It's a low-key, open forum, where the managers listen and take notes," says Jon Dow, Pazzo's assistant general manager. "Then we go through each idea, point by point, at our manager's meeting."

The EAC has a lot of weight around the restaurant, says Dow, and managers stress its importance to employees during their interview and orientation. "We used to have a suggestion box so that people could be anonymous, but this is a much better format," he says. "A great restaurant knows how to communicate in a highly effective way."

Attendance at the EAC meetings, which is voluntary, has been steady throughout the program's five years. About 15 of the restaurant's 70 employees attend on a regular basis. Occasionally, the managers will offer beer and pizza at a meeting to encourage others to attend. Some larger corporations, however, have found that anonymity works better for their employees. Both 151-unit Au Bon Pain and 120-unit Bertucci's offer a toll-free number for employees to call and make suggestions to either a live operator or a voice-mail system. "If someone has an issue in their restaurant, and they don't want to step on toes, this is an avenue they can take," says Kevin McCabe, marketing coordinator for Wakefield, Massachusetts-based Bertucci's. McCabe says the phone number, which is advertised on posters in the back of the house and in the employee manual, averages about three to four calls a day.

Au Bon Pain uses its weekly employee newsletter to remind staff members about the company's suggestion hotline. About every two months, corporate managers meet to consider the accumulated suggestions and decide which are the most applicable and beneficial. Suggestions range from recipe ideas to helpful management hints. "Somebody called and suggested using our unsold bananas to create a new muffin by adding them to our batter muffin recipe," says Jim Fisher, marketing vice president for the Boston-based company. "Someone else called in and talked about using double-sided tape to hang safety signs. It's amazing how involved people are. . . . The response [to the toll-free number] has been very positive. We're asking for their involvement and giving them the opportunity to be involved in the growth of the company. We're not telling them what to suggest; they're doing it."

It pays to listen

Employees often have great insight regarding how to streamline operations to be less complicated and cheaper. "[Managers] think they're supposed to know everything," says Timoteo. "But unless you are working in the field day in and day out, you can't. The employees know things better than we do."

At the Great Impasta, for example, Coffin was price shopping for a small bar refrigerator to store wine in when a staff member mentioned an empty walk-in refrigerator and suggested putting a wine rack in there. "I saved $2,000. It was such a simple no-brainer suggestion," she says.

During one of Timoteo's quarterly staff dinners, an employee in a Florida unit suggested that it was counterproductive to run an early-bird special on Fridays — the busiest day at the restaurant — when there was already a fried-fish special on the same day. "From that suggestion, we decided to run our early-bird [special] from Sunday through Thursday from now on. Now the items I sell on Fridays have a bigger profit," says Timoteo.

It's the little suggestions that make the difference, says Pazzo's Dow. "A lot of our suggestions are not earth-shattering, but it shows an attention to detail. Running a restaurant is composed of a lot of little things," he says. "We're putting tools in people's hands to teach them to be more effective, to learn how we can streamline ourselves to keep stress down and quality service up."

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