A recently conducted survey concluded that your actions speak louder than your words, which indicates the importance of body language in the process of communication. Food and Beverage is a service related sector and hence communication plays a very important role here. Hence is you are a part of restaurant management or you own a food and beverage business you have to be sure that your staff is well equipped with a great body language.
On the hind side, the problem is that if you cannot work on the body language of your staff, your business image could go for a toss. Everything from the facial expression to the pose of the body speaks a lot about the owners and restaurant management. If you want to save your food and beverage business from being embarrassed due to a lousy body language of the staff you’ll have to equip them with the right kind of training.
Before your staff understands what they have to do from a proper restaurant training guide or a service SOP it is very important that you can make them understand about things that need to be avoided.
The body language of a person can be determined by 3 factors, which are:
Head and face, Hands and arms, Body and legs.
Head & Face: This deals with the facial expressions and the way your staff projects itself. There are a number of things that should be avoided by your service staff which includes things like yawning, humming, chewing gum, burping or sniffing, sucking teeth or even rolling the eyes or head. These are bad manners and can irritate or annoy your guests.
Hands & Arms: A lot of people will get disgusted if your staff is using their hands and arms for purposes like digging their noses, scratching, fidgeting or cleaning nails. Even when hands are placed in the pocket, they can seem to look to casual and unprofessional.
Body & Legs: Leaning your body to a wall or tapping your feet continuously can be quite a distraction for the guests and moreover these represent an impatient and impolite body language. Stretching is another example of bad body language that your staff in the food and beverage industry should strictly avoid.
Keeping away from the mistakes mentioned above you staff can avoid all possible problems that your guests would dislike. At the same time you should be able to train them to match their pace with the guests. The style of working, talking and presenting should be neither such that the guest should feel rushed nor should he/she complain about slow service.
You should be very careful that your staff has the right body language so that your guests can feel understood and respected and they would cherish the experience. At the end you can be sure that with this feeling your guests will repeat the experience at your food and beverage place.
