How To Create An Accurate Bonus Program For General Managers Using Tattle

The motivation of a general manager trickles down to the team, to the food, and to the customer – therefore, it’s critical that these key players are incentivized to go the extra mile.

Let’s look at a quick three-step guide for creating a powerful, accurate bonus program that will result in higher output and satisfaction among GMs.

Step 1: Generate Quality Feedback

Any incentive-based program must be built upon the foundation of granular and operationally-useful customer feedback data.

Without this, tracking performance would be non-holistic at best, forcing brands to rely purely on sales or NPS data that is ultimately too broad and unscientific.

Tattle solves this problem by enabling restaurants to easily track dozens of performance metrics across every individual restaurant. These are broken down into categories and sub-categories (root-level factors). Here three examples:

Category: Food Quality
Factors: Temperature, Texture, Flavor, Spice, etc.

Category: Speed of Service
Factors: Waiting To Order, Waiting For Ordered Items, Payment Processing, Estimated Wait Time Accuracy, etc.

Category: Accuracy
Factors: Customizations, Missing item(s), Requested item(s), etc.

With a plethora of statistically-significant data points accessible to you and your GMs, everyone can keep track of progress in real time – resulting in maximum transparency. accuracy, and results.

Step Two: Hash out the details

Ideally, an annual bonus structure should be formed around an operational weakness that is prevalent across the brand.

For example, if you discover that your restaurants have trouble with speed of service – perhaps scoring an average of 3.65 out of 5 – then that should be the category to build bonuses around.

So, you must find a goal to work toward.

If you want GMs to achieve a 4.5 star speed of service rating, start there and fill in the gap with a variety of tiers and smaller bonuses until you get something that’s structured.

Here’s a simple example:

4.5 star average – 3% bonus
4.3 star average – 2% bonus
4.1 star average – 1% bonus

It’s worth noting that the smallest bonus should still be somewhat significant. Most of our partners start out with a 0.5 increase from the global rating. This way, it doesn’t feel out of reach for the GMs and the brand still improves measurably – even if only the bottom tier is hit across the board.

Next, you’ll want to determine the measurement. Here’s a quick list of Tattle metrics that are a great place to start when formulating a bonus structure:

1. Overall Customer Experience Rating (culmination of operational categories and factors)
2. Industry Average Customer Experience Rating (compared with the average CER of other brands in your vertical)
3. Operational Categories (e.g. Accuracy, Food Quality, Hospitality, etc.)
4. Root-cause Factors (e.g. Flavor, Temperature, Texture, etc.)
5. Ordering Channel Performance (e.g. Dine-in, Delivery, Take-out, etc.)
6. Guest Recovery Performance (% of dissatisfied guests who return/Incident Rate)

Here’s are a few other examples for GM bonus structures, many of which are currently being used by Tattle partners…

400+ Locations

Metrics: Overall CER across locations
Incentives: Fixed bonus amount when a target CER is met

50+ Locations

Metrics: Location-level CER >4 (>80%)
Incentives: Fixed bonus amount when target CER is met

25+ Locations

Metrics: Incident Rate <0.179%
Incentives: $1,000 bonus amount when target Incident rate is met

20+ Locations

Metrics: Top 5 locations by CER
Incentives: Fixed bonus amount when location is ranked top 5

5+ Locations

Metrics: Store-level CER >85%; Incident Rate <10%
Incentives: Fixed bonus amount when the targets are met

Once you have a program ready to go, you’re ready to move to the final step.

Step Three: Track GM performance

Over the course of a year, district managers and C-level executives can keep tabs on how GMs are performing within the Tattle dashboard.

Speaking of district managers, it’s important to get them involved in the process early, as they will be able to remind, energize, and advocate for the GMs under them. Additionally, they can also hold GMs accountable if their stores aren’t making headway toward the annual goal.

Some Tattle partners like to have year-end meetings to sit down and go through the Tattle dashboard, comparing yearly growth across all tracked metrics. It’s an opportunity to sink into the data, see where progress took place, where new challenges arose, and ultimately get a sense of the direction for the upcoming year.

Conclusion

Tattle makes it incredibly easy to initiate and track bonus programs for general managers. Not only is it a seamless experience for those creating the program, but for GMs who take part in it, as they are able to track their performance and garner the actionable data necessary to improve.

Are you using bonus systems to tangibly improve guest satisfaction and retention?