How to run de-escalation training

Darian Everding manages London Underground, a craft beer and whisk(e)y bar in Ames, IA.

Along with so many others in the industry, Darian has seen more angry, disruptive customers than before the pandemic. Ours is an era of rage, a recent article from the New York Times wrote, and the data bears that claim out: London Underground has had to ban more customers in the last year than in all of the previous five years combined.

So how do you teach staff to deal with these situations? The answer for Darian is communicating with staff and using de-escalation training. Here are the take homes from our conversation:

• Sometimes staff don't bring up difficult customers because they feel like it's their problem, not the business's. That's not true, of course. If one staff member has had trouble with a particular customer, then others usually have as well. So the key is to get staff feeling safe about sharing.
• Communicate regularly about problem customers with staff. This is how you get staff feeling safe enough to share. If you use a team messaging app like Crew or Slack, create a channel about difficult customers. If you have regular staff meetings, make time in each of those meetings to ask staff if there's been any trouble. If you don't currently have a space to discuss this stuff, then make one.
• Consider being on call for staff if they run into a situation they can't deal with. You'll sometimes have to go to the bar at 10pm on a Friday, which sucks, but what would suck more is your staff feeling like you don't have their back or having a dangerous situation arise.
• Hold de-escalation training with staff. In a majority of 1-on-1 meetings with staff this year, Darian's staff has independently asked for more practice with de-escalation training. They want it, so Darian provides it.
• But what is de-escalation training? This isn't a technical definition, but de-escalation is a set of skills you use to slow a situation down so that it doesn't escalate into violence or danger.
• What resources does Darian use? Darian recommends checking out Safe Bars, Right To Be and Healthy Pour.

The interview clips from this discussion aren't long (about 15 minutes total) and are very insightful. Do yourself—and your staff—a favor and watch them. And if you have any follow up questions please just reply to this email and I can get you in touch with Darian.

Why?

For a beer drinker there isn’t much worse than getting excited about a beer you’re going to order, ordering it, then being told it’s no longer available.

You’re disappointed, and instead of straight-up joy, you’re starting the night off with a bad experience.

(The experience isn’t much better for the bartender—I know from experience.)

Depending on how out-of-date your menu is and how many folks come in, you could be providing dozens of folks a bad start to their visit.

You should avoid this experience, even if updating a menu is a pain in the ass (though it doesn’t have to be—more on that below).

How?

You can do this manually. How you implement it depends on what works for your team, but it could look like this:

• Create an editable menu doc in Google Docs, Word, Powerpoint, or whatever
• Make sure everyone has access to the doc and knows how to update it
• Make updating the menu part of the opening checklist and/or shift change checklist

It certainly takes some time, but if you avoid just a few bad customer experiences, that time is well worth it.

• After being pressed by investors, global brewers say they aren't worried that the explosion of Ozempic, Wegovy, and similar weight loss drugs will lead to a sharp drop sales. There's been some anecdotal evidence that taking the drugs suppresses appetite for not just food, but alcohol as well.
• Sam Adams just released its 2023 Utopias. If you haven't heard of Utopias before, it's 28% ABV and tastes more like a port or cognac than a beer, though it is brewed, not distilled. If you've got $240 lying around you can go out and buy a bottle.
• The Ohio state legislature is looking at an interesting law that would make it easier for breweries to end contracts with distributors. As state senator and sponsor of the new bill Andrew Brenner says: "Distributors worth hundreds of millions of dollars do not need protection from our local neighborhood breweries and it’s time state law reflected that.”