The pattern is predictable when installing video surveillance cameras.  For a period of time, food and pour costs will go down.  The employees are more careful and less likely to take chances.  They know that managers and owners are interested in employee movements.  Most restaurants can expect a two to three percent decrease in food and pour costs and a corresponding two to five percent increase in sales.  Adding these two numbers together can mean thousands of dollars a month more profit!

 Once the honeymoon is over, the numbers usually return to where they started, and more often than not, end up worse.  The good news is that if management is able to catch employees not following procedures and policies, the numbers will probably improve to the highest yet!

The Employees Dynamics

There are two ways that employee moral can be affected in a restaurant.  The first morale killer occurs when management does not enforce enough controls over servers or bartenders. Over time, this lack of control causes the employees to begin to resent working there.  With inadequate controls and enforcement of procedures, the employees start to think about how easy it would be to give into temptation and basically-honest employees start to feel emotional conflicts.  Under this pressure, they start to rationalize – “everyone else is doing it”, “it’s understood that it is part of my compensation”, “if I don’t make enough money, I won’t be able to work here anymore and the restaurant will suffer” – are but a few justifications to yield to the temptation.

 The second way to lower morale is to install surveillance cameras designed to watch the employees’ movements.  Unless the cameras are monitored and transactions verified regularly, the losses may not decrease. In many cases, losses will actually increase.  For loss deterrence to be effective, the employees must be convinced that the surveillance recordings are being reviewed.  They must be periodically caught doing something not conforming to procedures or policies.  If they are never caught, they will correctly assume that nobody is watching the recordings.

Once the employees realize that nobody is interested enough to watch the recordings, the effects are potentially disastrous.  The employees start to think even less of management.  They can start to think that the owners are not only lazy, but don’t trust their employees anyway.  A whole new set of tempting justifications now kick in – “they think I’m stealing anyway, so I might as well”,  “OK the gloves are off now”.

What Now?

In order to realize any loss deterrence value from video surveillance, it is imperative to be able to catch employees acting outside procedures and policies.  One way to accomplish this is to review the recordings each day to try to catch anything out of bounds.  This can be quite time consuming, given that a typical restaurant will have eight or more cameras to watch.  Another method is to pay an outside service to review the recordings.  Both of these methods can be time-consuming and expensive.  The payoff, however, can make it all worthwhile.

 A more modern approach would be to use the processing power of a computer.  All employees fall into behavior patterns after working in the restaurant for a while.  “The challenge is to compare the behavior of all the employees to each other and to themselves over time.  This approach is the only way to consistently ferret out the potential losses.  All cash-drawer openings and closings, all orders, all voids, discounts, certificates, miscellaneous sales, comps, and tips need to be analyzed and filtered for non-standard behavior.”, says Brian McMillan, Analyzer Product Manager for In Sight Commander Systems.

 In Sight Commander Systems has developed a suite of programs that analyzes restaurant employee behavior and activity in order to highlight potential problem areas.  If an alert is detected by The Analyzer, the owner or manager is notified by email.  The owner can them access the computer at the restaurant and view the actual detail of the behavior that caused the alert. 

Video cameras may be effective for insurance, Workers’ Comp, and liability issues, but need to be part of a more complete system in order to be effective as loss-deterrence tools.

Brian McMillan is Director of Product Development of In Sight Commander System, Inc.  a software development company specializing in restaurants and video surveillance systems.  He can be reached at (714) 940-9800 or www.insightcommander.com