While I agree generally with what has been said, what about emergency notification of that employee?
In a family emergency, they likely won't have contact info for the restaurant to call it and have management take care of notification. They'll call the cell phone. So do you have your employees turn in their phones and you filter the calls for emergencies?
While most cell contact is casual and personal, they do serve an important notification function in some few circumstances. Management should recognize the possibility and help train their employees in ways to manage that contact effectively within the bounds of the job.
Most people have no pre-set emergency signal for contacting them in discreet ways in such situations. A text message with a 911 prefix is a good example. That way the screen can be checked quickly and discreetly out of the customer area for an emergency code and ignored if the code isn't there.
Yes, the customer is owed a respectful service. But we need to respect that servers are real people with lives too.
Just being devil's advocate.
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