…the asshats will play. Maybe it doesn’t go exactly like that but in my experience it seems to be that way.
I have three managers. My strongest manager is also the newest so she doesn’t have 100% control over her folks yet but they are quickly learning that they need to behave. My most experienced manager is too damn nice, not quite wishy-washy but close. I am fixing that. I trained him a couple three years ago when I was managing so he knows how I am. The store he took over in February was his second one and it happens to be the one that had the perverted camera dude prior to that. Before that manager the one that opened the store about a year ago also had no backbone so these people have gone close to two years with no discipline or direction.
The employees at the other two stores love it when I work with them but these folks hate it because I spend two days being a complete asshole to them because close to 90% of the things they do are the wrong way so it isn’t just a matter of gently correcting ands redirecting. I am constantly correcting and in some cases criticizing, which is something I hate to do.
My third store the manager has absolutely no control over his people and they have no respect for him. He’s lazy and treats most of them like shit and goes out drinking with the one or two that are his favorites which is a big no-no as a professional. As a matter of fact it’s part of our written policy that we don’t fraternize with them. That kind of stuff can lead to all kinds of problems.
Either way, when I am spending time at the stores they behave. They also show up for work and on time because they know that if they aren’t at least in the parking lot prior to shift change I have no problem calling in replacements. Too many people that want to work to deal with their drama and bullshit.
My managers each work six days on and two off and I generally take one or two of the days in between. That way they eventually each get a weekend. There are some exceptions to it during holidays and race weekends but for the most part I don’t mess with their days off and I leave the rotation alone. Occasionally something will come up where one will request a different day off and I generally try to get it done. This was one of those weekends. My new manager is off today and tomorrow and I had promised my most experienced manager the weekend off. Rather than make one of them change I decided to just deal with it. I spent the day at my busiest store and left the other one in the hands of two manager trainees and my relief manager. You would think that with three of the eight employees working being some type of management that shit would get done but you would be oh so fucking wrong.
The waitresses left out of there without doing ANYTHING that they were supposed to. After I finished at the first store I had to go take care of the paperwork and banking at the one I wasn’t at today and when I got there it looked like they had been through a damned hurricane.
I have worked with most of the folks at that restaurant and have pretty much decided that most of them are going to have to be replaced, or at least a few key folks. My manager doesn’t like getting rid of people or hiring and training new ones so I will just have to run them off myself. I’ve already started by firing the girl that hung me today.
What I have found interesting is that some of my old employees are starting to come out of the woodwork. The are where I run these three restaurants only had one until 2000 or 2001. I ran that restaurant all through the nineties and at one point it was the busiest one in the state. I have had a lot of people work for me and several of them have been popping back up lately. It’s nice because they know how anal I am about cleaning honesty, timeliness, and no drama and stuff like that but they also know it makes them more money as well. I am slowly but surely replacing people with some of them.