Restaurateurs, Covid-19, and Establishing Trust With Customers and Employees
By: Fenix Safety Audits
Tags: Covid 19, Public Health, Restaurant Business, Public Safety, Risk Management

New Protocols for Restaurateurs, New Customer Expectations

It’s time to consider the epidemic tool kit, and what we think of as standards for that toolkit. The pandemic has shown that mitigation efforts, and responses have to change. Shut-downs and lockdowns are not feasible for the long term, and prior to Covid-19 were not used. While the legal world is trying to figure out every brand’s weakness and culpability, businesses have to consider their best interest-both for staying in business, mitigating risks, and remediation to protect their employees and customers.

Last Friday, I spoke with Harvard educated epidemiologist and former McDonald’s franchisee Dr. Christine Crawford on Covid-19, it’s effect on the restaurant and hospitality space, and things that restaurants and restaurateurs need to consider in the new normal. (Watch the interview here)

Kimberly Nasief: Thank you Dr. Christine Crawford for joining me today. This is our first call that we’ve done. You are on our advisory board for Fenix Safety Audits. I would love for you to tell us a little bit about your background before we get started!

Dr. Christine Crawford: Great! I am glad to be here with you and am really excited about Fenix and what we’re about to embark upon. My name is Christine Crawford, as you said. I studied Biology and fell in love with science and Spelman College in Atlanta. I ended up finding epidemiology and went on to pursue my Doctorate in Epidemiology at Harvard University, now the TC Chan Harvard School of Public Health.

When I finished my doctorate, I then went on to teach a year of college and to serve as EIS officer, so an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer for the Center for Disease Control. We responded to lots of disease outbreaks, like the West Nile, Post 9–11 Bio terrorism surveillance, and anthrax. At the end of that two years, I decided to come back and join the family business with my mother, which was actually McDonald’s. So, after a career in public health, I became a McDonald’s franchisee for the next fifteen years. That’s where I worked, not just running my restaurants, but in leadership, both at a local level, including marketing, on up into a national level. I worked on menu strategy, kitchen design layout evolution, turn around, lots of things over the course of fifteen years.

Kimberly: It’s interesting. If you’ve never worked in a restaurant or you have never herded cats in that space, and I just ran a small backpacking lodge when I graduated from college for two years, but nobody realizes how important that kitchen layout is for efficiency, smoothness, flow, and getting stuff out as quickly as possible. There is a science to it that I don’t think people pay attention to you unless you’re in the middle of it.

Dr. Crawford: No, and you know how many steps that it takes to get to a piece of equipment and what saving a couple of steps really means over the course of time. Especially with McDonalds, where we do the volume that we do. So, it was a really interesting opportunity to think about things that could save steps, for people all over the world. It was great!

Kimberly: You know, to caveat, in my former life in the mystery shopping and market research industry, we would do price audits and timing for different fast food companies and the timing thresholds were so important from the minute you got to the ordering window or walked in the door, to when you received the big Mac and Cheese or the chicken nuggets. No one realizes that it is those seconds that enables it to be fast food.

Dr. Crawford: Very much. But it is something that I think we all think about inherently as guests, but you don’t think about how, one delay in one place can transform your entire experience, right?

Kimberly: Right! So, anyway, I segue wayed there. Sorry about that. How Long have you been in YPO?

Dr. Crawford: I’ve been in YPO, since I think 2016, so I think four years now.

Kimberly: Me too! That’s when I joined. And you’re in the Southern Seven, is that correct?

Dr. Crawford: I am in Southern Seven. We are the largest chapter, might be over four hundred members?

Kimberly: And it it’s funny. You would think that, you have Southern California, which has so many chapters and you have the Southern Seven with so many states.

Well, thank you again for being here! I am going to jump in and ask a few questions of you.

When you think about the Corona Virus and then, even stepping back further from that, when you think about sort of the key factors and people who are operating the buildings: The restaurateurs, the hotel operators, when you think about Covid, what are the things that people within the restaurant space need to be thinking about as it relates to Covid prevention, and bringing customers back. Talk to me a little bit about that.

Dr. Crawford: So, let me say that my mother and I exited and sold our restaurants about 2 years ago. But my heart and my entire soul is definitely with my fellow restaurateurs during this time. I just cannot imagine it because it is already a difficult and stressful business and so I have nothing but the greatest empathy and sympathy for them for soldiering through and appreciation for how they have gotten through this.

But I think it is the same thing that you would always be concerned about when running a restaurant, and that is the consistency, and the consistency of your systems. So, consistency with regards to service, consistency with regards to food, with cleanliness. It is how are all of those systems being repeated in the exact same way, so that my guests have a wonderful experience, and know to expect that same experience each time they visit with us. And then I think the other piece that as restaurateurs, and I think any employer, that you spend your time absolutely obsessed with is your people, right? And it is the people who are both

your employees and team members, as well as the guests to your establishment. I think that Covid cuts to the core of both of those: Okay now that I’ve got to adapt my systems for this new thing in this new way of doing business; how do I start to think about making sure that it is consistent? That I make changes as I have to, and we learn more every day, right? So, something that I got my people to do last week? I may no longer need them to do because I need to do this new thing going forward. And thinking about how do you make those changes? How do you build in that consistency when the stakes are so very high for us now? And how do you keep both your employees and guests safe?

Kimberly: And there is already a myriad of processes that are already in place, from opening shifts, to mid-day, to closing shifts. And, in those things that need to be remembered on a daily basis, and now you’re adding a whole new level of, not memorization, but activity that needs to be repeated every hour, every shift, every time. Like the cash registers open that we weren’t anticipating. I mean, I was at Michael’s last week, or TJ Maxx, and it was my first time in there in seven months. They had somebody who was specifically spraying every time somebody came up. They would wipe the counter-top off, they sprayed the keypad off on the credit card processor; I never knew that there would be such a good use for the saran cling wrap. They would cut a piece off of the roll and put it over the credit card processing keypad. So, when you entered in any numbers on the keypad, you had to touch it, and they could immediately pull it off, sanitize the counter, put a new one on ready to go. You don’t think about the new little things that have to be added on the day-to-day process, so it certainly adds another level of complexity, and another line item on the budget.

As far as consumers, what does the hospitality industry, the restaurant space, need to do to give consumers comfort, that the venues that they are entering into are safe?

Dr. Crawford: I think a lot of places are rushing to put out messaging, right? You walk in any place now and there’s lots of signs, right? And I think that there initially will be attention to the kind of messaging around expectations, behaviors for both guests and employees, so they’ll look for that. But I think, certainly, as we spend more time with this and this becomes kind of more of the new normal, it’ll be really looking at the behavior. I think it is not just: Okay, do you require that I have a mask on? I am looking at your employees wearing masks. Are they wearing them correctly? Do you have stations for hand sanitizer? Things that we used to think of as nice to-do’s, like, oh, that’s nice that they have hand sanitizer station for my hands, is now an expectation, right? And it’s not just the one in the entry way, but is there another somewhere else, or are there wipes?

Kimberly: The mask below the nose?

Dr. Crawford: Right. The mask below the nose! When I tell you more times than not, I’m like you have chin mask! What is a chin mask? Why do you need a beard guard to shop at the grocery store, right?

Kimberly: I saw one of those yesterday!

Dr. Crawford: Whether or not your employees are adhering to what you said are going to be the standards, what we all expect to be standards now, as well as the enforcement, right? And if you are supposed to be checking in guests for some fine dining- I was traveling in Chicago and they were taking temperatures, right? So, are you doing that for absolutely everyone? Are you asking guests to stand back until you can get to them? But those things are really important now, right? It’s because I’ve made the decision to come out to eat, I’m excited because I’m tired of cooking. I’m appreciative that somebody else has made a meal for me and especially my family, at this point. So, for all of that! But for those who have some additional anxiety, once you get there and you’re like, okay, I really didn’t mean to stand this close. And for all of this emotion, you know, both joy and angst that that a dining experience may encompass in this time. What cues as a guest am I going to see that you’re concerned about my health, and that you’re taking care of both your employees and me? I think I was already tuned into sanitation, having run restaurants, but the way that I look now to see if everybody in the kitchen has a mask on, what those procedures are, is very different.

Kimberly: It’s interesting, having gone to two restaurants recently. One was the Del Taco drive through for my children who were who were demanding tacos, and I did not want to cook anything else. Just the notification even in the drive thru: Wear your masks when you come to the window, making sure that it’s all contactless payments, the window is shut until you are handed your product. And that that brings comfort. Just things that you weren’t paying attention to before like your credit card: You hand it in and you get your credit card back, you are handed off things. I think with restaurants and restaurateurs, there might be a struggle, or there probably is a struggle, because while there are things you should be doing, there is no delineation of what must be done, other than perhaps your jurisdiction says masks, no masks, gloves, hand sanitizer 60%, or 70% for equipment.

But there are other things like informing your guests, whether it’s through social media or through your website, that if you’ve had any of these symptoms do not come in, if you’ve had these encounters do not come in, and that you are doing the same thing for your employees. So, establishing that baseline of trust.

There was one place that I went to, I thought was remarkable. I like using OpenTable because you get reservations, but obviously you get the points and you can save your points up for free meals later, and I made my reservation on OpenTable. It was actually for Father’s Day for my dad. When we got to the restaurant, they had someone at the entrance of the parking lot with an iPad. And they asked did we make a reservation? We said, yes. They asked for our name and they checked it; and they weren’t letting anybody on the parking lot or into the restaurant if you weren’t on the reservation list so that they could maintain the spacing. When thinking about those additional procedures that companies are putting into place just to make sure that they don’t over seat, that they maintain that social distancing, it’s a brand-new world. You know, restaurants moved fast enough as it is, and layering all these things that it makes it far more complicated.

So, obviously you’re on our advisory board and thank you for joining us again! When you think about what we’re doing and what companies can do from just that credibility and establishing that currency of trust with both their customers in their employees, from a First Party audit perspective, where they’re running their own self checks and keeping track of it, to the Third Party audit perspective, how do you think that those impacts the compliance? Do you think that it’s just one more thing that needs to be done, and what are your thoughts around that?

Dr. Crawford: So, having been on both sides, from having received both First- and Third-Party audits, it’s interesting. When I was coming on to the board and thinking about it, I wish that I had embraced Third Party audits as an opportunity to help me gets things right. To see it not as this is one more check, but honestly, let me see if things are going the way I think, in the way that I say that they’re going. If it’s not, then how do I fix it? Because a lot of times it is, you know, it happens in relationships, it happens at work, you need that kind of external perspective because you get used to things and you assume that something has happened, right? Because I asked Amy to do this and she’s really reliable and she’s one of those people that if I tell her to do something, she does it every time. Well, it may turn out that with everything with Covid, and with everything else going on in her life, she may not be as consistent as she once was, or may not understand this new procedure, or a new way that you asked her to do something.

So, I think that Fenix has a tremendous opportunity to help operators say, okay, these are the things I think that I’m doing. But to have someone else say, okay, these are the procedures that you’re actually doing. And to help you figure out how you need to adjust because we have systems and checklists, and it may be that you just made a mistake, which we all do every day, and learning it should be that it’s not the servers responsibility to do this cleaning, it is someone on the maintenance staff, that makes it more consistent or vice versa. But given your particular restaurant and your staff, you need to know how to make adjustments, and in this time, you are going to need it because things are continuously evolving, right? So the attention that we put on the procedures that we put in place for surfaces may not be as important going forward; so, if that’s not as important, now that she spent all of the time, you know, with the young lady in TJ Maxx to get her to put it on the press and seal, now you’ve got to ask her to do something else. I think it’s of tremendous value to have a Third-Party Audit. She’s now doing this or not doing this, and how do we need to change? So, I think that there is absolutely no better time for operators to get the assistance that they need by a pair fresh eyes that can help you navigate this phase, right?

Kimberly: And especially when you have multiple footprints that you are involved with. If you have one location, you might have a tendency to be your own eyes and ears because you are there. When you have one hundred, five hundred, a thousand it becomes much more difficult to see where the risk is and remediate.

Dr. Crawford: And we all know, right? I mean, that’s true with your family, everything, things run differently when you’re there. I used to say the moment my car would hit the lot, and someone saw me drive on, or in the drive thru, my customers are going to have a very different experience than those who were there thirty seconds before I pulled on. And that is just true. And if it’s not the owner, then it’s the general manager, or whoever is your best. This is all of us, all of us are different in the presence of others. So, it’s just an opportunity to give your customers the experience in a way that you can’t on your own.

Kimberly: That leads me to my last question for you, what do you think happens after Covid-19 from a consumer and company awareness standpoint? I hear it’s going away, death rates are down, and then you hear the numbers are going up and we need more testing. At some point this will go away, but what has been done to the consumer psyche, and what has been done to the business psyche?

Dr. Crawford: I think that some of the things that we have learned to look for will not go away. I think that this is a new expectation around cleanliness, around systems and, as you said, around trust. I’ve never had to have more trust between the places that I choose to shop, to eat. And that is not going to change, because while Covid, hopefully, prayerfully, goes away, the idea that we’ve lived through this means that I know that this could happen again, and so it’s going to become a new normal. So how do we make sure that our guests continue to feel that trust that we built between each other, and make sure that we are taking care of them and their health? I think I don’t think that is going anywhere at all and I think that may actually be a change for the good. I think certainly both as guest and as restaurateurs, and anyone in the hospitality industry, we always appreciated at one another, but I think that we are going to fall in love even more, right? You can actually not have to cook seven nights out of the week, three meals a day, right?!

Kimberly: No, I think you’re, right. I love cooking, don’t get me wrong. I love it. I love making messes in the kitchen, and feeding people is comfort for my soul. But you do it for three months straight without a break and you’re like, I want somebody comes to cook for me tonight and I don’t care what it is. They can make me a fried Bologna sandwich on white bread. I just I don’t want to be in the kitchen right now.

Dr. Crawford: I want them to wash all the dishes…

Kimberly: And while they are at it, if they could go ahead and clean the house…Well thank you Dr. Crawford! I really appreciated it and we’ll talk soon. Have a great weekend!

Dr. Crawford: Thank you! You as well.