Mexican Restaurant Needs Assessment

Needs Assessment

(Mexican Restaurant)

O V E R V I E W

My Role: Co-Investigator

As a graduate student, my team and I volunteered to conduct a needs assessment for a real Mexican restaurant in Oaxaca, Mexico. The client came to us with concerns over the restaurant's turnover rate and asked us to investigate why employees were ending their employment with the restaurant willingly. We collected data via interviews and surveys using several performance improvement frameworks to uncover the issue. After analyzing the data, we recommended seven interventions to the client that may possibly increase employee satisfaction and lower the turnover rate.

My Role: Co-Investigator

As a graduate student, my team and I volunteered to conduct a needs assessment for a real Mexican restaurant in Oaxaca, Mexico. The client came to us with concerns over the restaurant's turnover rate and asked us to investigate why employees were ending their employment with the restaurant willingly. We collected data via interviews and surveys using several performance improvement frameworks to uncover the issue. After analyzing the data, we recommended seven interventions to the client that may possibly increase employee satisfaction and lower the turnover rate.

O V E R V I E W

C H A L L E N G E

Tlayuda Querida (a pseudonym) is a traditional Mexican restaurant located in Oaxaca, Mexico, a city internationally renowned for its culinary scene. The owner came to us after having operated the restaurant for nine months. He did not have previous experience in the restaurant industry, but he had extensive experience owning and running cafes. When the project began in September 2023, the restaurant employed 13 members on staff, including an assistant manager, a chef, three cooks, three servers, two baristas, one bartender, one shopper/maintenance person, and one host.

The owner asked us to investigate the cause of the restaurant's high turnover rate. The monthly turnover rate, accounting solely for employees who left the restaurant willingly, was 8.62%. Extrapolated from the nine months of restaurant operations, the annual turnover rate was 103.47%. The owner desired the annual rate to be 15-20%.

The owner was dissatisied with the turnover rate because it impacted his business in several ways, which include:

Lost investment of time and money training employees who leave.
Insurance is paid for employees for a week after they leave.
Time and money to hire new employees, onboard and train them.
In the case of newly hired cooks, a lot of ingredients are wasted during training and the first months of work. In turn, inconsistent food makes customers unsatisfied.
New cooks and bartenders are much slower in preparing food and drinks, making customers unsatisfied.
When a new chef is hired, the menu has to be redone.

We conducted the needs assessment to uncover the causes of the high turnover rate and to suggest interventions to lower it.

F I N A L R E P O R T

Click to view the final report.

Figure 1: Rummler & Brache's Nine Boxes Model

Reproduced from The Nine boxes model. (2020, October 15). RummlerBrache.com.

https://www.rummlerbrache.com/nine-boxes-model

We decided to employ Chevalier’s Updated Behavior Engineering Model (BEM) to get a deeper understanding of how the restaurant was performing at the individual level than we felt that the Nine Boxes Model could give us from its "performer" row. The BEM was also used to scan the restaurant's internal environment and its impact on employee satisfaction. Traditionally, this model tries to find out if employees have the information, resources, incentives, knowledge and skills, capacity, and motives to perform their duties as expected. We utilized the model to see if the prescence or lack of these factors contributed to employee satisfaction or lack thereof.

Figure 2: Chevalier’s Updated Behavior Engineering Model (BEM)

Reproduced from Chevalier, R. (2003). Updating the behavior engineering model. Performance Improvement, 42(5), 8–14.

Finally, we looked at the external environment using Judith Hale’s Dynamics of Performance to identify any political, social, economic, infrastructural, competitive, and environmental factors that may have been negatively impacting the attrition rate and also to see if they would help or hinder any possible interventions.

Figure 3: Judith Hale’s Dynamics of Performance

Reproduced from Boise State OPWL. (2020, October 6). Useful questions for starting a project and conducting an environmental scan [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMHT5U9HwmE

A B O U T

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Made with Articulate Storyline and Vyond, this e-learning module helps prospective English teachers find suitable employment in South Korea.

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A role-playing game that teaches players how to effectively manage procrastinating workers on the teams.

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A project for an elephant sanctuary in Thailand. It includes a safety video made with Vyond, an educational card game, and informational posters.

Dispelling Immigration Myths

Made with Articulate Rise, this e-learning module presents eight counterarguments to common myths about immigration into the United States.

R E F L E C T I O N S

The project had some limitations that hindered it from reaching its full potential and delivering the most value to the client. The biggest was the lack of extant data from the organization. Primarily, we would have liked to get the concrete monetary costs of the high turnover rate. Additionally, we couldn't find data on average turnover rates at restaurants in Oaxaca, Mexico. If we had data for these two things, we would have been able to present a concrete gap that we could close and might have been able to demonstrate how much money we could have helped the restaurant save.

Another major limitation was that one other group member and I conducted the interviews with employees in Spanish, which is not our first language. This was the first time either of us did professional interviews in a second language. This made it difficult to grasp all the nuances of the interviewee responses and to ask high quality follow-up questions. Given that my immediate future involves working in a second language (Romanian) during my Peace Corps service, this experience has given me ideas for how to more effectively conduct interviews in a second language.

Finally, this project had some tensions due to conflicting personalities and busy schedules. It taught me how to handle disagreements and how to persuade people to see my point of view. Given that I will return to working in the international sphere after graduation, this is a skill that will be necessary to have as cross-cultural communication can often come with misunderstandings and conflicting perspectives.

Tlayuda Querida (a pseudonym) is a traditional Mexican restaurant located in Oaxaca, Mexico, a city internationally renowned for its culinary scene. The owner came to us after having operated the restaurant for nine months. He did not have previous experience in the restaurant industry, but he had extensive experience owning and running cafes. When the project began in September 2023, the restaurant employed 13 members on staff, including an assistant manager, a chef, three cooks, three servers, two baristas, one bartender, one shopper/maintenance person, and one host.

The owner asked us to investigate the cause of the restaurant's high turnover rate. The monthly turnover rate, accounting solely for employees who left the restaurant willingly, was 8.62%. Extrapolated from the nine months of restaurant operations, the annual turnover rate was 103.47%. The owner desired the annual rate to be 15-20%.

The owner was dissatisied with the turnover rate because it impacted his business in several ways, which include:

Lost investment of time and money training employees who leave.
Insurance is paid for employees for a week after they leave.
Time and money to hire new employees, onboard and train them.
In the case of newly hired cooks, a lot of ingredients are wasted during training and the first months of work. In turn, inconsistent food makes customers unsatisfied.
New cooks and bartenders are much slower in preparing food and drinks, making customers unsatisfied.
When a new chef is hired, the menu has to be redone.
When an assistant manager leaves, there is a lot of associated staff turnover. In the nine months of operation, there had been three assistant managers.

We conducted the needs assessment to uncover the causes of the high turnover rate and to suggest interventions to lower it.

C H A L L E N G E

R E F E R E N C E S

Boise State OPWL. (2020, October 6). Useful questions for starting a project and conducting an environmental scan [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMHT5U9HwmE

Chevalier, R. (2003). Updating the behavior engineering model. Performance Improvement, 42(5), 8–14.

Harless, J. H. (1973). An Analysis of Front-End Analysis. Harless Performance Guild, Inc.

The Nine boxes model. (2020, October 15). RummlerBrache.com. https://www.rummlerbrache.com/nine-boxes-model

Van Tiem, D., Moseley, J. L., & Dessinger, J. C. (2012). Fundamentals of performance improvement: Optimizing Results through People, Process, and Organizations. John Wiley & Sons.

Watkins, R., Meiers, M. W., & Visser, Y. (2012). A guide to assessing needs: Essential Tools for Collecting Information, Making Decisions, and Achieving Development Results. World Bank Publications.