'Operations' - what is it and why does everyone want it so badly?
We often hear 'I want a new role in Ops, can you help me?’. That magical end goal labelled ‘Ops’ seems to be where everyone aims for, but it’s clear that not everyone understands what it involves.
I have felt a need to write about this for a while now, with an excessive amount of similar conversations happening within our wonderful network. ‘I want a new role in Ops, can you help me?’. We hear this from range of different people across all levels of the industry with varying backgrounds from the front to the back. That magical end goal labelled ‘Ops’ seems to be where everyone is aiming for, but it’s clear that not everyone understands what it involves.
No Ops role is the same, after seven years in Operations myself, my experience of the Ops department is vastly different to the Ops roles I now recruit for. Within an indy restaurant group of say 2-4 sites, Ops may well be the first Head Office (HO) role to be recruited for within the business, meaning they take on absolutely every other HO role such as payroll, finance, HR, marketing, facilities, IT, and it’s a whirlwind. As an Ops Manager, as with being a GM, you need to be an expert at everything. Within a larger business, you still need to be hot on all these things, but you now have to work alongside the specialist experts in other depts to get it all done, and done well. Which is also a hugely big task, involving navigating workplace politics and inter-departmental relationships, whilst ensuring your management teams do the same, with the upmost diplomacy.
I think there are some real misconceptions about being in Ops and the freedom and flexibility it offers you. People see their Ops Managers having control over their own diaries, not being rota’d on in service, swanning into their restaurants, having a coffee and leaving again, but they don’t know what’s happening between these visits. There is the old phrase that ‘Ops never stops’ and I believe that this is the one role where this is still currently true, over most others. Restaurants and businesses are stripping out Ops roles all over the show, piling north of £15k extra onto their GM salaries instead to secure the best people in each restaurant. This means there are less Ops jobs to go around, meaning many stay put it the one they have, in fear of not finding another. The pressure on the remaining Ops Managers therefore piles up. This is not a ‘poor Ops’ post, it’s an attempt to paint a realistic picture and to try and debunk the myth that Ops is a cushy gig.
An owner, MD or CEO will generally recruit an Ops person to remove any of the day to day running of the business from their plate, therefore making the entire business the Ops Managers problem. If you ever wonder who’s job it is to sort anything out, the answer is always Ops. Broken toilets, alleged food poisoning, stock count discrepancies, a spelling error on an Instagram post, the chef called in sick - it’s all Ops. There has also been a real focus and genuine shift in the working hours of the GM’s and their FOH management teams, and rightly so. Management are tracking the hours and shifts they do, taking back overworked hours in lieu, or getting paid overtime. I don’t see anyone who is checking the hours of the Ops team, when their phones are on and when they are available.
This is not the case for all, many of you will be reading this with an Ops Mgr who doesn’t fit the above description and who checks out and ignores your restaurant post 5pm, I just don’t know any like that. There is a huge bottleneck for operations jobs, a queue of hundreds for each one. If we post a GM role we will get a handful of applications, if we post an Ops role for the same money, same location, the applications reach 300+.
I think the future of the industry will look like businesses creating hybrid senior management positions, half GM, half Ops. This will allow your GMs to take on more, build a sustainable and realistic career within hospitality, whilst also keeping their foot in the running of service day to day with a shift or two each week on the ground.
Having made the shift from GM to Ops mgr role coming of the back of the pandemic, for me I saw it as a step away from running a restaurant daily and the pressures it brings. However I agree that although there are benefits with the role, the work load can be very full on and I found myself juggling more plates and plates I did not know much about.
Therefore the key learning about making that step is go in open to learn and take things on board. I learnt so much in 1 year of ops and I am grateful that I was given the opportunity. The other aspect is that there is a higher expectation that you already know more than what you should do as a GM and therefore sadly training tends to be lacking when you start in the ops role. Almost like sink or swim, I had to find ways of doing things and solutions overnight- thank goodness there is YouTube nowadays.
Despite this I now really love being involved in ops and now have started to branch out on my own iproviding hospitality operations consultant. My website is jw-hospitality.com
Having looked at the current state of the hospitality industry in regards to recruitment, I absolutely agree with what is said- very far and few Operations manager roles now and GM salaries seem to have grown and so has their JD’s, whilst encompassing things I never did when I was a GM.