Work culture at your coffee shop is more than just “good vibes”—it improves employee retention, affects customer interactions and can even help your coffee shop make more money. Happy employees show up to work with a good attitude and excellent service. Plus, it makes your job as owner or manager more enjoyable, too!
So while we educate Texas Coffee School students about shop layout, marketing, trends, and more, we’re also directing our focus on the people who make things happen. Read these seven tips that our team of educators put together on building a positive work culture at your coffee shop.
1. Train Effectively
A well-trained barista, one who’s clear on their responsibilities and knows the drill for all coffee shop operations, is indispensable. This employee will delight customers and help correct other employees. They’ll be proactive in getting tasks done. And they’ll find work satisfaction in knowing they’re performing up to standard.
Good training also equals great customer service. In addition to making drinks and cleaning the cafe, train your employees to remember customers’ names, hold friendly yet brief conversations, and keep the line moving. This will create a positive experience for both regular and new customers.
Overall, keep training consistent. Create a training manual and designate a barista trainer so that every new hire is trained identically.
2. Be Considerate With Scheduling
Scheduling might seem like a secondary task to you, but it’s a big deal to employees. Know your staff’s needs for scheduling and try to honor their needs as closely as possible.
Dayna, a Texas Coffee School Educator, with more that 15 years of coffee shop management background has found that scheduling an employee no more than four days in a row helps keep them refreshed and able to maintain a work life balance. She cautions against scheduling staff from an evening close to an opening shift the following day—or a “clopen” shift, which is grueling physically and mentally.
3. Prioritize Metrics and Staff Development
A way to help employees stay on track is to create monthly key performance indicators, or KPIs, for your coffee shop and share them widely. This gives staff a target to aim for and a baseline for fulfilling their job expectations.
“I have found that staff felt involved with the company on a broader and long-term basis when shop health information was made available,” Dayna says. Shop health factors could include waste, monthly sales, most popular drink, and average ticket times.
You can also hone in on employee KPIs. Have each barista, shift lead, and manager create a personal development plan with three performance goals—two given by a manager and one personal goal. These goals should drive them towards a specific outcome. With each goal, they should create an action plan that can get them to their goal.
If the employee wants to advance in the company, have regular meetings with them to assess their progress. If the employee only wants to improve in their current position, a quarterly review may be sufficient.
4. Offer Incentives
Everyone loves a reward. But it’s more than just a little treat; it’s an incentive to continue performing well and be proud of the work they’ve done.
Consider allocating items like a free bag of coffee per month, a free drink per shift, or a certain percentage off their order when they’re not working. These seemingly small incentives are great motivators. And they allow for continuous product tasting and feedback, which leads to more professional development for baristas!
For managers, you may want to look at a more structured bonus incentive based on year-over-year sales growth.
5. Learn Communication Styles
A key part of managing people is knowing how to communicate with them. Everyone receives feedback and praise differently. Some employees may need you to be straightforward and not beat around the bush. Meanwhile, that may cause other employees to shut down.
Ask your staff questions to get to know their communication style, how they learn and how to best support them.
6. Give Feedback
Once you’ve learned to communicate effectively with your individual team members, you should be able to offer feedback. Meaghan, a Texas Coffee School educator with over a decade of experience managing large chain coffee shops, calls in-the-moment feedback a “coaching moment.” These coaching moments should occur soon after the event but off the floor, in the back of house—not in front of customers or coworkers.
“My biggest piece of advice with coaching is to ask questions rather than tell them what they did wrong and how to fix it,” Meaghan says. “You might say, ‘Hey, I observed that *insert event here*. How do you think you could have handled that differently?’”
By asking questions, you open the floor for the employee to take ownership of what they did and how they can change for next time.
7. Create a Safe Space
Finally, it’s important to create a work environment that feels safe for all your employees and respects their identities. In the past five years, numerous coffee shops have closed or experienced staff walkouts due to leadership failing to ensure an inclusive workspace. It may even be beneficial to undergo inclusion training as an employer so you can be prepared for any situation and provide resources that support your staff.
Learn more about how this Austin coffee shop, run by Texas Coffee School Coffeepreneurs®, is building real community through inclusivity.
Implement Culture at Your Coffee Shop Starting in the Classroom
Texas Coffee School offers multiple classes geared toward helping coffee shop owners and managers run successful cafes and manage their teams.
Our Coffee Shop Management Training Course is designed to be the turn-key solution for coffee shop, bakery, and cafe owners that need to get themselves or their coffee shop managers trained and up to speed on critical business operations and management skills to effectively run a coffee shop.
Our 3-Day Coffee Business Master Class hands-on barista training, detailed coffee business education, and coffee shop operations training from the highest rated educators in the industry.
Check out upcoming class dates and invest in your growth as a coffee shop owner or manager today!
