Big City BA - Episode #1 - The Diner That Couldn’t Keep Waitstaff
(Photo by Thomas Lardeau on Unsplash)
Author's Note - I've been a writer since the day I learned how to write my ABC's. I love to make up new worlds and people and throw then into different situations.
The story below came from an idea that popped in my head in the middle of my MBA - how can we tell tell MBA and BA concepts through story? Set in the futuristic mega-metropolis "Big City" (aka - BC), you follow the newly graduated Olivia Temple in her BA apprenticeship.
I really enjoyed writing this story and hope you enjoy reading it! I'm hoping to have many more episodes in this series!
Ann
There’s are things people don’t tell you about when you start your first real assignment as a Business Analyst in the Big City: it’s never what you expect. From what I'd been told, most junior analysts ease into it. You shadow your mentor, attend a few meetings, take notes, figure out the vibe.
Not me. I got handed to Saul Hammer.
Hammer Solutions is one of those one-man operations that somehow keeps running despite the fact that the man running it doesn’t seem to want to. The office sits above a pawn shop in the older part of the city. The stairs up to the second floor smells like old carpet and broken dreams.
I arrived on the first day of my apprentice assignment at 8 AM sharp. A bell jangled as I walked into the old office. I took in the piles of paperwork and file folders on every flat surface and wondered what I got myself into.
The first person to acknowledge my existence was a woman sitting behind a desk overflowing with paperwork and files. She was in her late fifties with bleached-blonde hair that showed her brown roots. Her eyeliner was so sharp, it could have opened that morning's mail.
She smiled at me as I approached. “Morning, hon. Are you that new apprentice the Bureau of Business Administration is sending over?” She flipped through a few pages on her desk. “Ms. Olivia?”
“Yes, ma’am. Olivia Temple.”
She waved a hand. “Oh, please don't call me 'ma'am'. You’ll find out soon enough I ain’t no such thing. Name’s Mandy. Saul’s slave- I mean, personal assistant. You want some coffee?”
“Sure,” I said. I wasn’t much of a coffee drinker, but I felt like I needed something to hold.
She handed me a chipped mug filled with something that was hot and smelled bitter. “Saul likes his coffee the same way he likes his clients - complicated. Not sure how he can drink it that way. There’s milk in the fridge, but I couldn’t tell you if it’s any good. I haven’t bought supplies for this office in over three months.”
“That’s because I buy them.”
We both turned at the voice. A tall man in his sixties stood in the doorway that led to the next room, leaning on the frame like it owed him money. His hair was more gray than brown, and he had the kind of posture that suggested he was permanently unimpressed with everyone.
Mandy fanned herself with a stack of paperwork. “You move like a ghost, Saul. One of these days, you're gonna do that and I’m gonna drop dead and it’ll be your fault.”
He didn’t bother responding. He just tilted his head toward the office behind him. “Temple, in here.”
I followed him through the doorway. His office was basically a bigger mess than the front room. Folders were stacked in teetering piles on every flat surface. Two computer monitors that looked at least a decade old sat on the desk. The window behind his desk looked as though it hadn't been cleaned in at least five years.
Saul dropped into the chair behind his desk and motioned vaguely at the one opposite. I perched on the edge of the seat and set my messenger bag on the floor, hoping the bottom wouldn’t be ruined by whatever the brown stuff was on the beige carpet.
He studied me like he was trying to decide whether I was a bad idea he could still return.
“So,” he said finally. “The Bureau really did it. They sent me an apprentice.”
“Yes, sir.”
He sighed. “Don’t ‘sir’ me. Makes me feel like I should have a pension. You can call me Saul.” He leaned back, grabbed a pen off his desk, and spun it between his fingers. “You know how this whole thing happened, right?”
“No, sir. I mean, no, Saul. They just said you’d be my field mentor.”
He chuckled once, a laugh that had no humor in it. “Let me tell you, kid, don’t have drinks with the regional director. That bar knew how to mix its liquor. Next thing I knew, I was slumped in my living-room chair with a hell of a hangover and a slew of emails from the Bureau telling me to expect my apprentice today.”
I smiled, unsure if he was kidding. I found out later that he wasn’t.
He leaned forward, eyes sharp and unblinking. “You’ve done the coursework, yeah? BABOK, frameworks, all that?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Forget half of it. Out here, the work doesn’t care about your diagrams. People call when something’s bleeding money or breaking down. It’s our job to figure out where it’s actually hurt.”
He gestured toward the door. “Your job, for now, is to listen. Watch how I handle things. Don’t talk unless I ask you to. Got it?”
“Got it.”
He nodded once, like that was enough conversation for the morning. “Good. I'm sure there's some forms you need to fill out or something. Mandy will help square you away. She knows all that Bureau stuff better than me.”
As if on cue, we heard the jingle-jangle of the old bells stuck to the door. We had a visitor. I heard Mandy’s voice greet whoever it was and then state cheerfully but firmly, “I'm sorry, sir. Mr. Hammer’s in a meeting. You’ll need to make an appointment.”
Saul looked up at me, eyes narrowing slightly. “Looks like we’ve got our first case.”
He stood, straightened his jacket, and called out, “Mandy! Let whoever it is in.”
She opened the door just far enough to poke her head in. “You sure? He says it’s urgent, but he didn’t call ahead.”
“That’s fine,” Saul said. “Urgent is good for business.”
He motioned for me to vacate the only visitor’s chair. I grabbed my bag and stepped aside, pulling out my tablet before tucking myself into the corner of the room.
The man hesitated just inside the doorway, like he wasn’t sure if he’d come to the right place. Mandy tried to give him her reassuring receptionist smile, but her face wasn’t really built for customer service anymore.
Saul motioned toward the chair I’d just vacated. “Have a seat.”
The man didn’t move right away. “Is this confidential?”
Saul nodded once. “Nothing leaves this office unless you want it to.”
“What about her?” He motioned toward me.
“This is Ms. Temple. She’s my apprentice and bound by the same ethics, oaths, and promises every BA is required to follow.”
The man studied me for a moment before sitting. He crossed one leg, clasped his hands together, and exhaled. Up close, I could see the tired creases around his eyes and a tremor in his fingers. He reminded me of my classmates during finals week, living on caffeine and not enough sleep.
Saul took a seat and pulled out a pad of paper and a pen. I was surprised. Almost no one used real paper anymore.
"What can we do for you, Mr..." Saul left the statement open.
“Name’s Marty Colson,” the man said. “I own three diners here in the city. Well, two that are working, one that’s… not.”
Saul tilted his head. “Not working how?”
“My waitstaff keeps quitting. It's not normal turnover. I’m talking same-day walkouts. I hire someone in the morning, and by lunch, they’re gone. No fight, no theft, no drama. They just leave.”
I immediately started noting symptoms. High attrition. Same-day abandonment. Possible cultural or operational issue. Maybe a process mismatch between expectations and reality.
Saul asked, “How long has that been happening?”
“Three weeks, maybe four. Right after I promoted a new manager. I thought it was a fluke at first, but now it’s costing me real money in recruitment, training, refunds, lost customers. I've heard from other restaurant owners that my midtown location has a bad reputation among the local hospitality workers. I can't have that!”
Saul’s mouth twitched like he wanted to smile but didn’t. “What do you want from me, Mr. Colson?”
“I want you to figure out what’s going on and fix it."
“We can do that. You said you’ve got three diners. Do they all three have the same menus and management structure?”
“Same everything, except the managers, of course."
I was already sketching mental swim lanes. Same inputs and processes, but different output at just one location? That screamed an environmental or behavioral issue, not a systemic one.
Saul leaned back. "Tell me about this manager."
"Guy’s name is Rick. He's worked for me for the last five years, first as a waiter and then as a team lead. and then as an assistant manager at one of the other stores. Always been a great worker. Thought I'd give him a chance and moved him up to the managerial spot for our new location. Now I'm starting to think that was a bad decision."
Saul’s gaze drifted to me for a second, like he was silently saying, You catching this?
I nodded and jotted notes on my tablet. Inexperienced leadership could be a possible root cause.
“Alright,” Saul said finally. “We’ll take a look. No promises but we’ll see if we can figure out what’s going on.”
Marty reached into his jacket, pulled out a business card, and slid it across the desk. “Here is my card. You can reach me at the number on the back.”
“Understood,” Saul said. He picked up the card, turned it over once, then tucked it into his coat pocket.
Marty stood, adjusting his jacket like a man trying to hold himself together. “I really appreciate it. And, thanks for keeping it quiet.”
“Of course,” Saul said. "We’re professionals."
“Right,” Marty muttered, glancing around the chaos of the office. “It sure looks like it.”
He left, the door bells jingling in his wake.
Saul sat back, rubbed his temples, and stared at the door for a long second. “Alright,” he said finally. “First case. Welcome to the glamorous world of business analysis.”
Mandy peeked around the doorframe. “So what’s the emergency?”
“Staff retention problem,” Saul said.
She snorted. “Oh good. Something simple.”
Saul stood, grabbed his coat from the back of his chair, and turned to me. “Come on, Temple. We’re going out for breakfast.”
I blinked. “We’re eating? I thought we were investigating.”
He looked at me like I’d missed something obvious. “Exactly.”
The morning rush was already in full swing in BC by the time we hit the street. Saul didn’t wait for me to catch up. He just stepped off the curb and waved down a cab like it owed him money. I climbed in after him, still wondering how exactly I’d gone from Bureau paperwork to “private investigator for breakfast joints.”
“Can’t we just assume it’s the manager?” I asked as the cab jerked into traffic.
Saul gave me a sour look. “You can assume whatever you want. Just don’t build solutions on it.”
“So you don’t think it’s the manager?”
He shrugged. “Could be. Most problems are leadership problems. But that’s not analysis. That’s guessing. We don’t guess.”
“Then what do we do?”
He leaned back in the seat, eyes on the passing city. “We listen. Systems talk, Temple. You just have to know how to hear ’em.”
I’d studied active observation and silent elicitation in the Bureau’s BA foundations course, but none of that prepared me for Saul’s approach. No questionnaires. No stakeholder interviews. Just breakfast.
Marty’s flagship diner sat on a corner in Midtown where the rent alone probably gave accountants ulcers. The outside gleamed with chrome and glass. A new sign on the front tried a little too hard to look retro. The moment we stepped inside, the smell of coffee, grease, and fake leather hit me all at once.
The diner was almost full with the usual breakfast crowd trying to get food and caffeine down them before another busy day of BC chaos. Saul led the way down the long row of tables before sliding into a booth near the end. “We’ll start here,” he said, picking up a menu.
“You’re actually ordering?” I asked.
“Staff suspect less when you look like you belong,” he said. “Order whatever makes you look harmless.”
“Hot tea and toast, then,” I said. “Classic harmless.”
A young waiter came over, clearly new. He still had some hope left in his eyes. “Morning! Welcome to Marty’s Grill. What can I get you?”
Saul looked at the kid the way he looks at a spreadsheet full of bad data. “Coffee, black, and whatever you recommend.”
The waiter hesitated. “Sorry, I'm new. I just started this morning. I don't really know the menu. Personally, I’d go with the pancakes. They’re hard to mess up.”
Saul glanced at me. “Then pancakes it is.”
He nodded, scribbled on his notebook, and turned toward me. “And for you?”
“Hot tea and toast. No lemon, two sugars, extra butter on the toast.”
The waiter nodded as he scribbled like a madman. “Got it. Should be up in a few minutes.”
When he left, I asked, “You really trust diner pancakes?”
Saul smirked. “I trust bad systems to show their flaws faster when they’re busy. Now watch.”
I sat back and watched. What Saul called “watching” was basically stakeholder analysis in the wild. Customers, cooks, and waitstaff, all with competing goals and zero alignment. In school, they made it sound like paperwork. Out here it looked more like triage.
It wasn't long before the chaos became obvious. The young man seemed to be the only waitstaff working the busy morning. One of the two cooks shouted at him about missing tickets while he tried to balance three plates and a pot of coffee in his arms. A man in a button-down shirt and tie, who I assumed was the manager, Rick, kept popping in and out of the kitchen like a jack-in-the-box, yelling orders and cashing out customers. Customers had to yell to get a refill on their coffee and it seemed most left angry. The couple in the booth next to us argued quietly about whether to leave.
I watched it all play out like a sequence diagram unraveling in real time. Every role, every task, every failed interaction, live and unfiltered.
Saul leaned back, calm as ever. “What do you see?”
“Not enough people trying to do too many things with no clear handoffs,” I said, keeping my voice low. “The cooks seem to be churning out the food but nothing is happening after that. It's just sitting there in the window. There is only that one new waiter working and he looks so overwhelmed, he's about to cry. The manager is micromanaging and seems to love to yell. You can see how he interacts with customers that he's stressing. Communication is total chaos.”
“Good,” Saul said. “And why?”
I thought about it. “No structure. No process. Probably no training.”
He nodded. “You’re learning.”
I started capturing the failure points into my tablet. The front-of-house was improvising in real time and doing it badly. Worst of all, the manager didn’t seem to see it, or if he did, he didn't know how to fix it.
The waiter appeared at our table with two cups. He set Saul’s coffee down, then slid a steaming mug in front of me. I looked inside to find only hot water. No tea bag. I started to say something but then stopped when I saw actual tears of frustration in his eyes.
"Oh no! I forgot the tea bag and lemon. I'm so sorry! Hold on. I'll be right back."
He rushed off before I could tell him not to worry about it.
Saul smirked at me. “Should’ve ordered the coffee.”
“Do you think we’ll see our food any time soon?” I asked.
“Probably not.”
Five minutes turned into twenty. The couple beside us finally gave up. They stood, left a few bills on the table, and walked out without a word. A man at the counter shouted something about his eggs being cold. Someone else tried to pay for their check but was left standing at the front counter for ten minutes. He finally stuck his head in the kitchen and yelled for someone.
The manager, Rick, appeared in the doorway, looking angry and tired. “No customers in the kitchen. Out!”
“I want to pay for-”
“Then you wait at the counter like a human being. Where is your waiter? Roy! Where in the hell are you?”
The young waiter appeared just behind him, his hands full of freshly plated food, probably for the hungry group of construction workers in the corner booth.
“I’m right here. If you’ll just-”
Rick whirled around and slammed into the pile of plates. There was a clatter of porcelain as food exploded into the air and all over the floor. A single saucer covered in jelly rolled across the tile like punctuation at the end of a sentence.
The diner went silent.
The young waiter stared down at the mess all over himself, his manager, and the floor. His jaw tightened and his knuckles turned white around the one plate he’d managed to save.
“Oh my God, Rick. I'm so so-"
Rick’s voice came back sharp. “You're so clumsy! You shouldn’t have been standing there with your hands full. You’re in the way of everyone trying to work.”
“Trying to work?” The kid barked a humorless laugh. “You haven’t let anyone work since I got here. You just yell and blame people for stuff you never trained them to do.”
Rick took a step forward. “You watch your tone.”
The kid shook his head, slammed the last plate onto the floor, and untied his apron. “No, I’m done. You can serve your own damn coffee.”
He tossed the apron onto the floor, grabbed his backpack from under the counter, and walked out. The doorbell jingled on his way through, its cheerful tone completely out of place.
No one said a word. Even the cook at the grill stopped moving.
I’d heard about this in the Bureau’s case files. This is the tipping point - the moment when everything collapses because one person can’t take it anymore.
Rick muttered something under his breath, kicked one of the broken plates out of the way, and disappeared back into the kitchen.
Saul watched the door swing shut, his face unreadable. Then he said quietly, “And there it is.”
I blinked. “There what is?”
“The point where a system fails loud enough for everyone to notice.” He stood, tossing a few bills onto the table. “Come on.”
I frowned. “Where are we going?”
“Back of house,” he said. “We’ve seen the symptoms. Time to meet the cause.”
The kitchen was smaller than I expected and hot enough to peel paint off the walls. Fryers hissed. The grill smoked. Two cooks moved in opposite directions, clearly not working from the same playbook. There were no prep lists in sight, no station labels, and not a single word being exchanged that didn’t sound like an accusation.
Rick stood near the line, still brushing egg off his button-down with a grease-slick towel. He didn’t look up when we entered.
“Who’s on that order of hash?” he barked. “Don’t you dare let it burn!”
“How could it burn?” the woman on the grill snapped. “I finished it right before Roy’s temper tantrum. It’s been dying under the lamp for five minutes.”
Rick turned and glared. “Then why the hell didn’t it go out?”
“Because there’s no one to take it out,” she shot back. “Our only waiter quit because you body-checked five full breakfasts into him.”
Rick looked like he was about to bite her head off, then caught sight of us. He squinted.
“Who are you?”
Saul didn’t even flinch. “Saul Hammer. Mr. Colson sent me.”
Rick blinked, thrown. “A consultant? He sent a BA without telling me?”
“He probably figured you were too busy to answer your emails,” Saul said, already scanning the line. “We just saw your front-of-house implode in real time. Thought we’d check out the rest of the operation.”
Rick crossed his arms. “Well, unless you’re here to cook or bus tables, you’re just in the way.”
“We’re here to figure out why your people keep quitting after a single shift,” Saul replied. “That sound familiar?”
Rick rolled his eyes. “Yeah, because Colson keeps hiring children. He keeps expecting these college dropouts to be able to handle a Midtown breakfast rush? Come on.”
“You could train them,” I said quietly.
Rick scoffed. “I don’t have time for hand-holding. This is the busiest of the three locations. I need servers who know what they’re doing.”
“Okay,” Saul said calmly. “So what do you do instead?”
“I show them the register, tell them what sections to cover, and hope they don’t screw it up.”
I glanced around. “No one walks them through the menu? No shadow shifts? No written SOPs?”
Rick looked at me like I was speaking another language. “It’s a diner, not the Navy. People either have it or they don’t.”
Saul stepped closer to the ticket rail to inspect the hand-written tickets. “What’s going on with your ordering system? It’s all manual right now?”
“Yeah. The kitchen printer’s dead. Has been for about three weeks.”
“You’re handwriting every ticket?”
“Got no choice,” Rick muttered. “IT says the part’s on order.”
Saul nodded slowly. “So your only failover process is to panic and wing it.”
Rick bristled. “We’re making it work.”
“You’re not,” I said. “We just watched your last server quit. Mid-shift. Covered in syrup and fury.”
He didn’t respond.
I scanned the line more closely. There were stacks of handwritten tickets, out of order and in different handwriting. Some were clipped. Some just shoved near the pass. There was no way to tell what was hot, what was waiting, or what had already gone out. No timestamps. No table numbers on half of them.
“Do the cooks know what order things go out in?” I asked.
“They’re supposed to listen for call-outs,” Rick said.
“Which means they miss half of them during peak,” Saul said. “And when they miss them, you jump in and take over.”
Rick didn’t deny it.
“Then you yell,” I said. “And they yell back. And you try to handle it all yourself. And new people come in, get overwhelmed, and leave. That about right?”
Rick sighed. “You’re making it sound worse than it is.”
“We’re just describing what we saw,” Saul said. “This isn’t a bad team. It’s a broken system.”
“And you’re its single point of failure,” I added, gently.
Rick rubbed his forehead. “I didn’t ask to run a broken kitchen. I’ve been doing the best I can.”
“I believe you,” Saul said. “But your ‘best’ is bottlenecking the entire operation. You’ve been plugging holes in the dam by throwing yourself at the leak. But the system still leaks.”
I watched Rick's posture shift. Not combative. Just tired.
The cook at the grill crossed her arms. “He’s not wrong. I’ve been saying this for weeks.”
Rick muttered something under his breath and leaned against the wall.
Saul patted the man on the shoulder and then turned to me. "Come on, Temple. Let’s go back to the office and build them a system before this place eats another new hire.”
Saul didn’t say much on the ride back to the office. He leaned his head against the window like he was watching the city think, not move. I, on the other hand, had my tablet open, fingers moving fast, trying to untangle the knots I’d just seen and capture all of the ideas that kept popping into my head.
When I finally ran out of words, I turned off my tablet and stared out at the passing city too. I could see why Saul was staring outside in silence. The way the traffic lights, car lights, and buildings just flash by felt almost hypnotic.
Mandy looked up from her desk as we walked in, still nursing that cup of coffee that had clearly been reheated one too many times.
“So?” she asked. “Did you save the restaurant from itself?”
“Mostly from its manager,” I said, dropping my bag onto the floor.
She snorted. “That’ll do it.”
Saul moved to his desk and pulled his yellow legal pad toward him. “Temple. Walk me through it.”
I perched on the arm of the busted guest chair and pulled up my notes. The screen glowed like a confession.
“Alright,” I began. “Here’s the breakdown. It looks like the ultimate trigger event was the broken kitchen printer. Once that went down, all orders had to be handwritten. There was no backup process to such a breakdown and no clear chain of communication. So now you've got chaos during peak hours.”
“Manual systems aren’t the enemy,” Saul said. “But they need structure. A fallback flow, not just panic with handwriting.”
I nodded. “Exactly. But Rick didn’t create any structure. He just absorbed the whole failure himself. That’s where the spiral started. He became the central point in a system that needed to keep moving.”
“He became the system,” Saul said. “Which means when he fails, everything fails.”
“Right,” I said. “He was touching every ticket, every question, every issue. And he wasn’t documenting any of it. He just barked out answers like the loudest voice in the room would magically turn into a process.”
Mandy raised an eyebrow. “So wait. Because the printer broke, people quit?”
“Not just that,” I said. “That’s the trigger. But the real problem was everything else Rick hadn’t put in place. No onboarding. No orientation. New staff were getting dumped into a live service floor without context, without clarity, and without support.”
“Imagine,” Saul added, “being dropped into a play without a script, and the director yells at you every time you miss a line.”
Mandy winced. “Harsh.”
“There were no training materials. No job aids. No schedule for shadowing or mentorship. The new hires didn’t just struggle, they failed publicly. And then got blamed for it. Most didn’t even make it past their first lunch rush. They were set up to fail.”
“Rick thought his boss was hiring the wrong people,” I said. “But the people aren’t the problem. The system is.”
“Classic,” Saul said. “Most managers assume turnover means you hired the wrong people, but in reality? It usually means the system wasn’t ready to keep them.”
I scrolled through my notes. “Then we get to his management style. Micromanaging. Yelling across the kitchen. Zero delegation. No one was empowered to solve problems, which meant every problem had to go through Rick. And when that bottleneck hit capacity…”
“He exploded,” Saul said. “Which scared everyone else off.”
“Exactly. It wasn’t just inefficient. It was toxic.”
Mandy looked skeptical. “Alright, then. What fixes that?”
I tapped my screen. “First priority is to get that kitchen printer fixed or replaced and have a standby printer in case it breaks again. Then we'll start with process mapping. Lay out each stage of service. Order intake. Kitchen communication. Plating. Table delivery. Payments. Create visuals for new hires so they can understand how things move without memorizing chaos.”
“People shouldn’t have to be psychic to work a breakfast shift,” Saul added.
“Next is onboarding,” I said. “We build a consistent process for welcoming new staff. Day one, shadow a shift lead. Day two, guided hands-on practice. Include checklists, station maps, maybe even a quick-reference card they can keep in their apron.”
“Training isn’t just ‘tell them once,’” Saul said. “It’s reinforcement. Repetition. Coaching. People need to feel safe failing. The good news is that once it's established at this location, he can adopt it in his other two locations. That will allow all three locations to share staff and more than likely maximize profit.
“Also,” I continued, “I think they should restructure the staff hierarchy and add a shift lead. They really need someone to field routine issues and take pressure off Rick. That will let Rick focus on actual management instead of constant micromanagement. It decentralizes the whole system.”
Mandy gave a low whistle. “All that just because you couldn’t get a decent breakfast."
I smiled. “It’s always about the little things. Systems talk. You just have to know how to listen.”
Saul leaned back, hands behind his head. “Not bad for your first one. Just don’t assume they all end this clean. Sometimes the manager and the owner are the problem. And sometimes no one wants to fix anything.”
“I get it,” I said. “Most people want a hero. But we’re not here to fix the people. We fix the system that lets them fail.”
That made him smile. Not big. Not long. Just enough. He handed me his notes. “You’ve got it. Now type it up and email it to Mandy. She'll add our bill and send it to the client.”
Mandy clapped her hands. “That reminds me. I cleaned off one of the desks in the front office for you to use. It’s not much, but at least it has some horizontal space for your laptop and a couple drawers. Come on! I’ll show you.”
The Diner That Couldn’t Keep Waitstaff: Root Cause Summary
Problem Statement:
Flagship diner experiencing rapid staff turnover within hours of hire.
Key Findings:
- Manual ticket system due to broken printer created process failure points.
- No onboarding or structured training resulted in knowledge silos.
- Manager behavior created a hostile and chaotic environment.
- No escalation structure or distributed responsibility across shifts.
- Staff left due to stress, confusion, and lack of support.
Recommendations:
- Reinstate ticket automation by fixing or replacing printer.
- Create and distribute documented workflows.
- Implement onboarding: buddy shifts, visual SOPs, and checklists.
- Hire shift leads for support and handoffs.
- Provide targeted leadership coaching for the manager or consider reassignment to a better-fit role if improvements aren’t sustainable.
If you'd like to read more of this series, please check out the list of episodes here.