Training Your Staff for Restaurant Furniture Maintenance

Running a restaurant is a team effort, so even if you are the owner and operator of your establishment you will still need a number of competent people on staff that can help you out with the various day to day minutiae of the endeavor. Since you are the boss in this respect, it is your duty to train your staff so that they can end up doing the best job possible. The trouble that you might face here is that you potentially wouldn’t know what areas require the most effort on your part in terms of staff training, since there are so many different duties that your employees would need to fulfill.

In general, your employees would be split into two categories. The first would include those individuals that would take part in the cooking process, whereas the second would involve people that take orders, serve customers and handle other tasks such as cleaning. Cooks generally don’t do anything apart from their primary duty since that in and of itself is a full time job, but the rest of your employees would need to be versatile enough to handle a number of different responsibilities as the need arises.

Out of all of the responsibilities that the second category of workers would need to handle, cleaning the restaurant booths and other pieces of furniture in your eatery tends to be the most important. Hence, you should emphasize the right kind of training in this regard. Letting your employees clean your furniture however they want could potentially result in them damaging it which really wouldn’t be good for business. Part of this training would involve creating a schedule that they can use to optimize the cleaning in order to ensure that it is maintained.

The best kind of schedule would involve cleaning tables as and when required, with thrice daily sweeps that take care of any spots that might have been missed out on. Any more than this might result in your patrons getting disturbed so it’s always better to avoid going overboard. One good solution for this would be to assign different pieces of furniture to different members of staff. If a staff member has been assigned a specific area, they would be responsible for maintaining that area and you can hold them accountable if they fail to do this properly.

You also need to purchase the right cleaning materials that they can use. Disinfectant sprays are a big part of this, but a common mistake that many people make here is that they focus too much on the spray itself and forget that the material used to spread this liquid around matters a lot as well. Tissue is generally not all that great of an option so you should try to avoid it, but kitchen roll tends to work brilliantly since it is far more absorbent and the sheets are generally a bit larger as well.

However, you shouldn’t forget the efficacy of a dry wipe down either. This is something that is best done with a microfiber cloth. Using microfiber can be a key aspect of maintaining a high level of longevity for your furniture, since it removes a lot of dust and debris without leaving any scratches on surfaces. This is a highly superior cleaning product since it has a far greater surface area than a flat cloth which means that it is capable of collecting extremely large quantities of dust with a single wipe.

An added benefit of using microfiber to clean your eatery’s furniture is that it would require less effort on the part of your employees. A frequently cited reason for your furniture not being cleaned with enough frequency is that your employees find the task too difficult to manage. Giving them a high quality cleaning tool like a microfiber can cut the effort required for this task in half. Subsequently, your employees wouldn’t have all that much that they can complain about which means that you can hold them to a much higher standard of work ethic.

Now, just because you are paying your employees doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do everything in your power to make their jobs a bit easier. If you were to buy restaurant furniture that has been lacquered, this could potentially make the cleaning process so easy that no one would hesitate before doing it.

Lacquered surfaces are very slick which means that they can be cleaned in an instant. Remember, the more uneven or coarse a surface is, the more readily it will collect dirt and dust. Hence, coarse and uneven surfaces would unnecessarily difficult to clean too. A slick surface, on the other hand, would be almost perfectly flat which means that any dirt that’s resting on it would not have any crevices that it can hide in.

One reason for people not wanting slick surfaces is that they tend to get smudged pretty easily. Lacquered wood doesn’t suffer from this kind of issue though because it is a very thin layer. The texture of the wood underneath still stands out, and this can hide any smudges that would form once someone puts their hand on the surface.

If you and your employees work together, you can make keep your furniture and your restaurant overall extremely clean. Everything tends to become easier with teamwork, so you should play your part by buying easy to clean furniture that won’t elicit any complaining from your staff. This coupled with adequate training on your part should be enough to keep your furniture from getting damaged for a really long time.