One aspect that can make a work environment go from calm to toxic is competition among colleagues.
There is this “new trend” in restaurants where managers expect servers to receive positive reviews that mention the server who took care of the customer. Some even go as far as counting how many reviews each server got and defining things like bonuses out of that statistic. This is problematic on many levels. First of all, it makes customers uncomfortable, as they have a server that is more preoccupied about them writing their name on the review than about serving them. Secondly, it’s an unfair way to measure customer service, as it doesn’t take into account real good service and instead just good convincing tactics to force the customer to leave a review. And lastly, it creates a competition among coworkers that turns the environment into a toxic competition.
This last one may be the most important. This kind of competition has so many missing screws that servers start to notice that it creates a hostile workplace where, instead of focusing on good service, employees have their mind on making customers remember their server’s name. It also may produce bigger problems if servers start to try to get servers with better reviews in trouble. This could produce problems in the food, uncomfortable situations with customers, and even having to fire good servers.
This Reddit story reminded me of the sentiment that this whole system can produce on some servers. This envy and frustration can develop into a problem for the restaurant. I believe it’s better to focus on the day-to-day work servers do instead of focusing just on the reviews that only some customers leave. And if you are a server going through this right now, a great way to step up your game is being more assertive, repeating your name a few times over the night, and making the customer feel like a priority, even though you have more than 10 customers at the same time.
Author: Kayitsi.com
