Servers set the tone for the dining experience, and the cooking staff’s work goes straight from the kitchen to the plates of your customers, so it’s important to know who’s helping your business and who’s hurting it.

Employee evaluations are a great way to check in on whether your money is well-placed. Here’s why:

According to the Restaurant Resource Group, “You cannot control labor cost until you understand that you are not “scheduling” people but rather “purchasing” the potential to do work”. You don’t want to schedule more employees for a particular shift than are needed, as this will end up costing you money.

A better understanding of your employees through employee evaluations will help you determine how many employees (and which ones) you need for a given shift. A positive evaluation can help you decide who to invest in.

Restaurant customers often have favorite servers; they’ll similarly notice if the food quality changes depending on who is in the kitchen (one of my favorite Chinese restaurants is terrible on Mondays because they have a different chef that day).

Once you know who’s worth rewarding for their work, you can find ways to make them want to stay. This is easier and creates better quality continuity than having to hire new people if your star employees feel restless and underappreciated and start to move on. Training, morale, legal, safety, and legal issues can all have a negative effect on your business if you constantly need to change your roster or hire temporary workers to fill in for a recent departure.Evaluations can also help you refine your team.

Having hard data on how well your employees are doing gives you a stronger basis for any hard decisions about who should (and shouldn’t) be working for and with you.

Building a good team is especially important in a restaurant, where the success of a day’s work relies on solid communication between employees (for example, servers giving accurate orders to those preparing the food).

You’re not the only one who will notice an improved team dynamic. So will your employees; Jamba Juice executive vice president and CO Bruce Schroder believes that “employees will feel like they’re part of something and be excited to come to work.” The team dynamic is also evident to customers, who see the results of employee interactions unfold before their eyes in a restaurant. Schroder says, “It’s not just how we serve the customer, but how we service each other. Customers really notice that.”

Essentially, the happier your team is, the better customers will feel about your restaurant. This is good both for overall atmosphere and for your wallet.

If you’re interested in having your team evaluated, consider working with Grapevine Evaluations. We’re web-based, so we can assist companies across the country, and our evaluations can be tailored to suit your business’s unique needs. Our services are reliable and confidential, so you don’t have to worry about losing your precious employee data or having it fall into the wrong hands. Contact us today to learn more about our 360 degree feedback tool.