Ray Croc, founder of McDonald’s, had a saying to keep his employees motivated, relocating and working: “If you have time to lean, you have time to clean.” Meaning, if you have time to lean versus the counter through “nothing to perform,” you have time to clean or be fertile to make your customers’ suffer a tiny better.

You are watching: Time to lean time to clean

For those of us that have actually functioned in a retail, restaurant or other customer-dealing with market, this saying may be nothing brand-new. But for those of us that have witnessed idle employees standing around with their phones in their hands, avoiding eye contact with patiently waiting customers, you could wonder if they’ve ever even had the idea to be proenergetic throughout their dvery own time.

Recently, we came across an write-up on Serious Eats that thorough the everyday operations (and also heritage) of the

*
Dairy Queen in Moorhead, Minnesota. This Dairy Queen operates the very same way as it did as soon as it opened in 1949: hand-making many type of of the frozen treats, dips, and toppings rather of using the pre-packaged corporate materials. Because the original 1949 contract is still in tact, this outwrite-up of the ice cream chain doesn’t need to adbelow to many type of corpoprice rules – and also that’s the means owner Troy DeLeon likes it.

Aside from the reality that the hand-made goodies taste various (in the best feasible way) than various other Dairy Queens, DeLeon likes that doing things “the old fashioned way” keeps his employees busy.

See more: Why Did Allan Bakke File A Lawsuit? ? Regents Of University Of California V

“You go to the majority of fast food restaurants and also if it’s not busy, what is the staff doing? Sitting about, talking, obtaining into trouble, looking on their phones. We don’t have that difficulty,” he claims. At the Moorhead Dairy Queen there’s constantly somepoint to do: decorating cakes, dipping Dilly Bars or various other novelties, filling special orders. And “If tbelow isn’t something to make,” he notes, “there’s cleaning.”

This quote struck a chord via me. While it’s straightforward to create off idle employees as lazy or incompetent (and that might be the case) it’s truly the responsibility of managers to train their employees to always be functioning through a feeling of urgency, and to be filling “down time” via fertile jobs. By making expectations clear, and also rewarding this kind of “urgent” behavior, supervisors have the right to transdevelop their workpressure into one that will certainly prioritize customer company and geneprice loyal customers.

Do you enforce the “time to lean, time to clean” mentality at your business?