Amateurs who love to cook wistfully eye the restaurant business as the untaken career path that might have provided a more satisfying indulgence of their passions.
If only they knew.
Today’s restaurateur has to be a jack of all trades and a master of each: teacher, tech savant, trend watcher, chief customer officer, ops expert, financial wizard, even magician upon occasion. Mastery in the kitchen is a relatively minor part of the needed skill set, if it’s required at all.
In truth, the job is usually more of a business position than an artist-in-residence appointment.
That’s never been more of an accurate assessment than it is today, with brilliance at the six-burner far less critical than adeptness at filling out forms and keeping precise personnel records. The paperwork required of an operator-slash-employer has increased exponentially, with new obligations constantly heightening the stack.
This summer brought proposals from states, cities, counties and the federal government to upgrade the protection of all indoor workers, kitchen staffs included, from dangerously high ambient heat. The floated operational burdens weren’t cripplers. Essentially, restaurants would have to take commonsensical steps like making sure cooks have access to water and can cool down away from the stove if need be.
The paperwork behind those actions is another matter. Training the staff to spot symptoms of heat exhaustion is a typical requirement. Ditto for providing more cool-down breaks. In some instances, a buddy system has to be set up so two workers will monitor the other for early signs of distress. A mandate to adjust schedules on the fly is a component of at least one jurisdiction’s proposed rules.
All of those efforts would have to be documented and stored away so regulators can ensure compliance and legal counsel will have counter-leverage if the employer is sued for alleged noncompliance.
A huge administrative burden was dropped on California restaurateurs this summer, though operators elsewhere seem not to have noticed. They’ve also apparently forgotten that what happens on the West Coast tends to roll inland.
As of July 1, all employers in the Golden State were required to have completed and adopted a plan for averting violence in their workplaces. Interestingly, the law specifically requires that the defense strategy also discourage boardroom violence, making you wonder what might be happening behind closed doors.
The legislation also mandates that a safety protocol be drafted so employees know what to do if violence should erupt, and that the staff be trained to act in accordance.
Any incident has to be documented in a special log, and employers have the leeway to seek a restraining order against an employer or customer who poses a threat, provided the establishment can prove it.
The obligations go on from there. And each required action has to be documented in detail.
In total, the law mentions 23 new record-keeping requirements for restaurants and other employers. Those obligations are on top of the record-keeping already required on other dynamics. For instance, the anti-violence plan has to be drafted in addition to an already-required plan for protecting employees from injury while on the clock.
CPAs might face less paperwork in the runup to April 15.
All the burdens make the job of a restaurateur that much tougher, their workdays that much longer, their aggravation that much greater. As businesspeople, they have to be focused on how many dollars they’re taking in and keeping. But their time is also precious, and more of it is being gobbled up by the surge in record-keeping obligations.
It’s like boiling a frog by gradually raising the temperature of the water in the pot.
Doesn’t that require filling out some form?