dallert123
Please provide response to this discussion please. Not an…
Please provide response to this discussion please. Not an explanation of what they said, rather a reply to what they said.
Evidence-based decision-making is connected to a new focus called Evidence-based Management, “Defined as the commitment to identify and utilize the best theory and data available to make decisions using basic principles” (Griffin et. al., 2020). As stated in our reading this week the five principles are as follows:
“1) Face the hard facts, and build a culture in which people are encouraged the tell the truth, even if it is unpleasant.
2)Be committed to fact-based decision making – which means being committed to getting the best evidence and using it to guide actions.
3) Treat your organization as an unfinished prototype – encourage experimentation and learning by doing.
4) Look for the risks and drawbacks in what other people recommend (even the best medicine has side effects).
5) Avoid basing decisions on untested but strongly helped beliefs, what you have done in the past, or uncritical “benchmarking” of what winners do” (Griffin et. al., 2020).
Last year my team was finally meshing, but we were having food cost issues resulting in financial misses and lost revenues that should have made it to the bottom line. Although, emotionally, I did not want to take a systematic and rigid approach to food costs, it was a move I had to make to ensure that the health of our business remained intact, even if the managers were frustrated with the things I was “adding to their plate.” The first step in controlling food costs is getting an understanding of where the money loss was coming from, was it from waste, overproduction, theft, overordering, lack of portion control, etc.
We took the following steps:
1) We implemented a bi-weekly inventory instead of monthly
a)This resulted in the managers cleaning up their inventory sheets because it helped save time, it also made them more
aware of what they had on hand so they did not order too many products (specifically perishable items like produce).
b)With practice typically comes higher performance levels, so implementing inventory every other week helped to
increase accuracy as well as efficiency.
2)We implemented waste tracking, production records, and projections.
a)This resulted in more awareness around what entrees students prefer over others and helped the team understand
appropriate production levels – again this helped in bringing attention to this aspect of the day and helped them build
better habits.
b)This also helped us narrow down which kitchens typically overproduced so we could focus on retraining the staff and
implementing better portion control.
3)We implemented weekly training on common functions in their day to provide further support and help increase the overall
understanding of the processes.
4)We analyzed and adjusted all snack prices to help fight inflation – this did bring the price up on many items significantly, but
one of the areas that were detrimentally impacting our food cost was pricing items too low and losing money on them.
5)We immediately enforced a no-overtime policy for managers – this was the hard part, asking much more of the managers to
fit into their days and enforcing firm shift boundaries.
Ultimately implementing all of these processes and building them into a habit with the managers was a lot of energy, especially after 2 years of covid service where we were serving twice the meals and never had enough staff, so everyone was in survival mode and overtime was happening continuously just to keep up with the basic demands of universal free meal service. It was a big lift for the team, it also was a tremendous amount of energy on my end to ensure I carved out time to analyze data and find out where the problems were happening. But through rigid implementation and follow-through, we made significant progress on food costs. During this stretch, my team really showed how much they trusted me as a leader and they did all the tasks I asked them for and truly pushed themselves to grow and learn in order to make a positive impact on the overall health of our organization. Additionally, it empowered the managers to run their kitchens in an efficient way and it provided them to tools to do so.
Reference
Griffin, R.W., Phillips, J.M., & Gully, S.M. (2020). Organizational behavior: managing people and organizations (13th ed.). Boston, MA: Cengage. https://www.gcumedia.com/digital-resources/cengage/2020/organizational-behavior
Include at least one in-text citation and reference.
