Area/District Managers Should Stop Visiting Restaurants During the COVID-19 Crisis

I’m writing this in early April of 2020 and I’m setting the stage of the current environment so readers of this blog in the future will understand the situation here in the US at this time. 2/3 + of the US is on mandatory social distancing, stay at home isolation through 4/30/20, restaurants are only allowed to sell take-out and delivery, and we are two to four weeks away from the dreaded peak of cases.

If you are a restaurant without a delivery or takeout business channel you are probably closed and you are worried about ever being able to re-open. The National Restaurant Association is predicting that 30,000 units have already closed permanently. This is the new reality and this isolation only went into effect 2 1/2 weeks ago.

Currently, I have clients that are still open and operating because of their robust delivery and take out models and their Area Managers are still visiting their restaurants in their local patches.

AREA/DISTRICT MANAGERS NEED TO STOP VISITING THEIR RESTAURANTS IMMEDIATELY!

An area manager that is infected with COVID-19 and who didn’t show symptoms for the average time period of 7 to 10 days could visit 5 to 10 restaurants, or more. Exposing those employees to the COVID-19 germs.

The following guidelines come directly from the state of Washington’s Dept of Health, most states are following similar guidelines here, I chose this one because it was very easy to understand:

Look at the 3rd bullet point: being within 6 feet of an infected person for about 10 minutes. That is all that it takes. The bottom paragraph states what you are supposed to do.

“You should monitor your health for fever, cough, and shortness of breath during the 14 days after the last day you were in close contact with the sick person with COVID-19. YOU SHOULD NOT GO TO WORK OR SCHOOL AND SHOULD AVOID PUBLIC PLACES FOR 14-DAYS.

The reason for this isolation is that you can be sick and contagious with COVID-19 for 7 to 10 days without having any symptoms. You could be infecting people for a week before you get your first fever or sniffle.

Because Area Managers are visiting restaurants, any customers that come into contact with employees who get sick have to do the same.

I’m not trying to be overly dramatic but having your Area Managers visiting their restaurants is exposing your brand, your employees, and your customers to an incredible risk.

The whole point of this blog is to avoid this:

A worse case scenario is that an Area Manager spreads the COVID-19 virus to multiple restaurants, resulting in their shutdown for a period of 14 days and the requirement of a major deep cleaning.

The part that is going to damage the brand immensely is going to be the public acknowledgement that customers who visited those restaurants are going to need to isolate, get tested, etc..

This could ruin confidence in your brand and will hurt the restaurant industry as whole as people will rethink eating from any restaurants during this time.

Some unlucky chain or restaurant is going to be the first. It is inevitable, and it is going to happen in the next couple of weeks or month. There are simply too many people that are infected right now that don’t have a clue that they are sick.

Do everything you can to not let it be you, I fear that very few brands could come back from that.

We recognize the need for Area Managers, they are a very important part of the multi-unit management infrastructure of our restaurants. We need to get them the tools they need so they can be affective from managing from home. We cannot risk them getting sick or exposing the units to unnecessary risk during this period.

We are hosting a webinar on how to make area managers more effective from home. You can click this link to sign-up: https://calendly.com/oa-sales/webinar-enabling-field-team-wfh

FYI: after the webinar is over, we’ll post a video in the blog of the webinar content.

Tommy Yionoulis

I've been in the restaurant industry for most of my adult life. I have a BSBA from University of Denver Hotel Restaurant school and an MBA from the same. When I wasn't working in restaurants I was either doing stand-up comedy, for 10 years, or large enterprise software consulting. I'm currently the Managing Director of OpsAnalitica and our Inspector platform was originally conceived when I worked for one of the largest sandwich franchisors in the country. You can reach out to me through LinkedIn.

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