I’ve been testing 5-minute huddles with two clear objectives and a quick role rotation rehearsal, and our average plated course time dropped from 14 to 11 minutes last Saturday for 180 guests. What’s one thing you include in your huddles that keeps standards tight without dragging on?
I end our 5-minute huddle with a 60-second ‘one risk, one fix’ round: each station calls a likely snag and the immediate countermeasure, and the lead writes just verbs on the board. It keeps standards tight and helped us shave about 2 minutes off plated times on Saturdays, but you need a hard timer or it creeps past five. Do you have expo run the clock, or rotate it?
We do a 30-second “86 + swaps” flash: anything off or thin gets named with the exact substitution and the phrase expo/FOH will use so there’s no mid-service debate. @bthomas21 love the risk/fix — do you lock the wording, too?
Quick win for us: a 45-second ‘yesterday’s ugliest ticket’ read-through — expo reads it verbatim, BOH/FOH call the fire and plate order back once, and we lock a single phrasing to mirror during service… If the board was clean, we swap in the special’s ‘one-sentence sell’ so everyone’s language matches without turning it into a mini training; @bthomas21, this pairs nicely with your swaps note.