Rally Your Team Around Core Values

Work culture in restaurants has been widely debated during the past decade. In recent years, it’s faced particular heat when looking at how workplace culture has affected the ability to hire and retain staff. These are both major operational challenges that restaurant owners and operators continue to grapple with.

Safe workplace environments, career growth, compensation, and evolving global issues like climate change, sexual harassment, diversity and equity, and the direction of the economy are all part of conversations around work.

More so than previous generations, today’s restaurant workers are more conscientious about the impact of their choices on these external issues. According to McKinsey & Co's State of Organizations report, roughly 55% of employees indicated that they would resign from a new job if it did not align with their personal values.

What does that mean for employers? The challenge for their business is to uphold and ‘live out’ strong, clear values that resonate with quality staff. This focus on values and creating a strong culture around them is key to hiring and retaining a team that will stick together.

The Difference Between Brand, Culture, and Values

Your restaurant’s core values underpin all your day-to-day routines. They define your business, well, to its core. These intangible concepts will influence what you care about – what you care about drives your actions, and actions, in turn, affect your staff, your customers, and your community. 

Core values will act as your business’ internal compass, guiding all business decisions, including hiring, menu adjustments, marketing, and management style. Establishing your restaurant’s core values is not something to be taken lightly.

Your brand, on the other hand, is how you want your guests to feel about you. When developed properly, your restaurant’s brand should act like a magnet, drawing in guests (and staff members) who support or identify positively with what you’re all about.

They might like the way you source your food, the design of your guest experience, or the partnership you have with local charities. A brand is often characterized by the emotional impression it makes with its audience (which are staff, customers, or investors in this case).

Finally, a restaurant’s culture is seen in the behaviors and norms exhibited by those who work there. It’s a living element of your restaurant’s operations that must be carefully cultivated every single day, for better or worse.

To tie these three pieces together, your core values should be visible in both your restaurant’s brand and culture. Building a brand that doesn’t live up to strong core values is one reason many restaurants fail. 

With an ever-increasing amount of competition in the restaurant trade, it’s critical to establish your core values and implement them into your culture.

Why Your Restaurant Needs Core Values

Many restaurants rely on the mechanics of service or hiring a talented chef. Those are necessary to maintain a functional restaurant, sure. If you want to thrive, not just survive in the restaurant industry, establishing strong core values when opening a restaurant will give you an edge over the competition.

Core values support the vision of what you hope to accomplish as a restaurateur. Openly communicating strong values will help you educate potential and existing staff and customers about what your brand stands for.

For example, if one of your core values is to stand behind the quality of your products, any product that doesn’t meet your standards is automatically not served. Your culinary and service teams will live this value and refuse to serve substandard food to guests.

Take a look at Danny Meyer and Union Square Hospitality Group. Danny and his team are renowned for their mission, vision, and values. Danny goes out of his way to educate and inform the public of his company’s core values, highlighting the intrinsic role they play in USHG’s approach to restaurant management and operations.

Core values also become a great recruiting and retention tool. Living your core values aloud, both inside and outside the workplace, will attract like-minded candidates and will help you determine who is and isn’t an addition to your culture during the interview process.

Erin Wade, owner of mac and cheese restaurant Homeroom, in Oakland, CA, believes living values aloud is just one critical aspect of building a strong team culture. 

Erin holds a weekly meeting at the restaurant where management discusses the restaurant’s finances and progress with the staff, but that’s only the beginning. “We're a mission-driven company that talks about our values and our purpose at work, because that's really what makes work interesting and exciting every day.”

How to Decide on Your Restaurant's Core Values

Core values are not a one-size-fits-all kind of thing. Some restaurants will attempt to take a solidified business culture and fit values into the existing environment. This usually makes very little headway, and can have the opposite of the intended effect. 

You need to start by selecting your values, and then shape your business around them.

It starts with leadership, since culture flows down, not up. Since core values play such an intrinsic part in the shaping of culture, core values must first pass the leadership snuff test. As a restaurant owner or operator, you’re the values gatekeeper — they have to resonate with you first.

However, don’t forget that core values only work when every member of a restaurant’s staff — most notably, leadership — consistently ‘live’ them instead of just talking about them. They have to mean something to everyone. They have to be something worth striving for.

Here's a quick, easy exercise to help you develop your restaurant’s core values.

1. Write a list of your personal values.

This may include things like:

• Community

• Family

• Charity/volunteerism

• Authenticity

• Supporting the local economy

• Honesty

• Integrity

• Hospitality

• Creativity

• Dependability

• Adaptability

• Quality

• Consistency

• Teamwork

• Credibility

• Respect

Write a list of about 20–40 core values that come into your head without too much thought.

2. Let that list sit for a couple of days. Then review it with a critical eye.

Review the list and start highlighting the values that stir a reaction from you.

You should end up with about a dozen or so values left on your list. During the next week, spend time thinking about how these values relate to your vision for your business, and whittle away any that don’t truly strike you at your core.

3. Get feedback from those you trust.

Bring this list of values to the managers, leaders, and staff you trust within your business. This could be the server who’s been with you for five plus years or the investor who gave you the cash to get your dream off the ground. 

Get their initial reactions and give them time to consider your values and come back to you with feedback, questions, and recommendations of their favorites.

After evaluating their feedback and selecting your favorites, you should be left with a list of 3-7 core values for your restaurant business. And there you have it.

Next comes the communication tour.

How to Adopt Core Values Into Your Team Culture

One of the most important roles as a restaurant owner or operator is to live out your company's core values every single day. Teaching and preaching the values you have chosen to uphold is essential to keeping them front of mind for everyone involved with the business.

Remember when we referred to your restaurant’s core values as a decision-making compass? That extends to your staff as well. Your core values should be used by management and staff in both front-of-house, back-of-house, and back-office roles to guide their decision and overall workplace behavior.

The more strongly defined the core values, the more likely this value system will serve as a code of conduct for all, promoting and guiding strategically aligned behaviors that reinforce your brand identity.

To achieve that, you’ve gotta get everyone on board.

After you create your list, type up your core values and prominently display them throughout your store room, your staff communications, your employee handbook, and your website so that staff (and customers) can be reminded of what truly inspires and drives your restaurant.

If you need inspiration, check out SuViche, a modern Peruvian ceviche and sushi restaurant in Miami, FL, and a Toast customer. SuViche proudly displays their team’s principles on their website. These values include things like continuous improvement, openness, and initiative, and they clearly define each one.

Now it’s out in the world, you can schedule a series of communication sessions to explain to your team what the values are and why you chose them. Walk them through the thinking behind each value selected, giving clear examples of how your values come to life. If you can praise particularly successful staff for how they’ve embodied your new values, even better.

Remind your team that their opinions are important, so ask them to come to you with questions and feedback on these new values. They can do this in-person, through email, or you could set up an anonymous Google Survey. If you receive feedback that warrants it, you can alter the values, and then communicate these changes openly to your crew.

Continue to teach and show your core values every chance you get — throughout staff training, in job descriptions, in pre-shift meetings, and just about everywhere else. Remind yourself of them every morning before heading into work to make sure you’re continuing to live them.

Strong values can help in decision-making. They clarify vision and pave the way for strategy. They tell the story of where you want to go and why. They drive new business and keep customers coming back for more. 

Last but not least, values can give your staff much-needed motivation to show up for themselves and their roles – because we all want to be part of something with purpose.

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