Alright, reality check.
December in the hospitality world is a bit mad! We dread it yet also love all the celebrations. December can be the easier month for revenue yet the hardest month for staff. It’s noisy, overbooked, and can be under-prepped.
Things that need to be on your mind as you enter the Christmas party stage.
Start with rotas. Make them deliberate, not desperate. No double-closes into opens. Don’t throw a newbie into a solo section on a Friday.
Cover every station or train it until it’s covered. Be fair: if someone works Christmas Day, give them New Year’s off. Publish the tricky shifts now with a clean swap window. Adults cope with sacrifice when the rules are fair.
Managers: no hiding in the office while the pass burns. Lead from the floor. Five minutes on the door, five on the pass, five resetting tables. Presence steadies the room.
Menus: be brilliant, not broad. If your kitchen can’t support an expansive Christmas menu at peak tempo, don’t write one. Offer the dishes you can execute perfectly with your weakest chef on the line. Consistency beats ambition in December.
Feed the team properly. Same time, every night. A hot tray-bake does more for service after 8pm than any staff party you’ll end up postponing. People pace better when they aren’t running on caffeine and crisps.
The grown-up bit: across the UK, 33.7 million working days were lost to work-related ill health and injuries last year. Stress, depression and anxiety led the list, affecting 776,000 workers and costing 16.4 million days. If you run December like a punishment, you’ll pay for it in January rotas and recruitment.
So what do you do? Don’t “work harder.” Tighten the system.
Cap the room before the room caps you. If your kitchen can genuinely push 90 quality covers between 7–9pm, sell 90. Full stop. Appoint a calm pace-caller each shift to set tempo: “Hold mains two minutes… pass clear by quarter-to… water run now.” Pair veterans with temps and give temps two non-negotiables: greet within 60 seconds; check back at two bites/two sips. Train them for the job they’ll do tonight, not the whole handbook.
Hiring more bodies isn’t a strategy on its own. Lots of operators bulk up for Christmas, many add a handful of extra people, an average of 8 new employee’s in the UK, but unless
you design the night around those humans, you just create bigger, slower chaos. Clarity buys you energy.
Kill the invisible losses. A table of six with dead glasses for fifteen minutes is a round you’ll never see. A ticket printer no one triages buries the pass. A manager glued to a screen instead of the room costs you review. Don’t let this happen.
December won’t be gentle. It doesn’t have to be ugly. Tell the truth about your capacity, set the rules in daylight, feed the crew, and lead from the floor when it turns. Guests still get their big Christmas do. Your team still likes the job in January and maybe they even enjoyed December!
