Why is being a restaurant manager so stressful?

Long days turn into long nights and it feels like you're constantly trying to catch up. Your average day running a restaurant will cause you to work shifts of more than 10 hours. And those hours will extend much further on weekends. Being a restaurant manager is a difficult job.

It's fast and stressful, and requires a special combination of skills and personality traits (most importantly, staying calm under pressure). It's hard to be a manager when you need to keep up to date with the suggestions and orders of the manager's boss and constantly monitor the staff and update them in various ways that can change throughout the day. With the kind of symbiotic relationship that exists in restaurants, a negative experience somewhere in the chain is enough to throw everything off balance. In fact, according to a survey, 91.9% of restaurant managers said that their job is stressful, representing a very large percentage of managers.

You'll stand out more by taking risks and being the first to follow a trend instead of copying the restaurant at the end of the block. With such a diverse range of responsibilities, hiring and firing, maintaining income, creating staff schedules and balancing everyone's needs, any restaurant manager job will involve some stress. If your supervisors or owners say that you can't do this or that you should do that when they haven't worked in a restaurant or manager before, this can often lead to poor results for the manager, employees and profits. One of the most common ways is to lower prices for customers, which will force all other restaurants to follow the game.

As a restaurant manager, it is important to try to explain in a simple but comprehensive way why certain modifications and measures should be made for the benefit of any case at that time. If we add to this the unusually long working hours that restaurant managers usually have to do, it is not surprising that they do not want to work as such for a long time, since this will affect both the mental and physical states that will accompany them in their personal lives. That's why restaurant managers must ensure that cleaning schedules and hygiene are in compliance with regulations at all times. For example, some restaurateurs are seeing a 4% reduction in labor costs after integrating 7Shifts and TouchBistro.

Be sure to experiment with the new things you're seeing in the restaurant industry, whether it's a customer loyalty program or social media contests. It is not uncommon for a restaurant to not do well in terms of money; therefore, it may not have enough staff and have to save money at all times, which requires energy to calculate every grain. Restaurant managers must assume many responsibilities, such as monitoring employees, ordering products, responding to complaints, receiving orders from above even when they don't make sense, scheduling shifts, recording payroll data, and more. The integration of several systems means that you have access to a management system that controls the various crucial elements of your restaurant from one place.

When there are 10 or 50 restaurants in the same area as you, they all compete against each other and try to stand out.

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Ernest Dargatz
Ernest Dargatz

Freelance food geek. Bacon expert. Certified internet buff. Typical coffee nerd. Avid coffee evangelist.