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How to get your staff to remember everything

13th May 2021 by Emily Dyer-Schiefer

I get asked all the time “What do I have to do to get my employees to remember everything?” It’s the most frustrating part of running a kitchen. How do other owners and founders take time off and leave their team in charge? 

They don’t. They use checklists.

I love checklists. I’ve used them in every business I’ve set up, and they’re now part of my top tools. I know that I can’t trust teams to do everything. I’ve learned that lesson for you. Even with knowledge of what must be done, we need a backup. Memory and distraction are big threats. Checklists provide protection against these. 

Building your checklist

Firstly, make a detailed list of everything you do, to your standards. From there make an easy-to-follow list for your employees. 

From that, you’ll build your checklist. I find the easiest way is to use a spreadsheet program. Your checklists don’t need to be pretty, but they do need to be functional. 

In the columns, layout tasks and days. Allocate a column for every day of the week that you are open.

 Checklist with two columns per day

You’ll see that each day has two columns, one to check and one for double-checking. This is because frustratingly, most checklists aren’t used because there is no accountability. We get around this by introducing double-checking.

As tasks are completed, they are marked off, either by checking or initialing. (I prefer initials because I like to know who did what) 

And that’s it. Uncomplicated, easy to implement, and guaranteed to work

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