Restaurant workers can make or break your restaurant’s performance – and that’s why they should be considered one of every restaurateur’s greatest assets.
These people do the heavy lifting in the actual location. No matter how savvy your marketing campaigns are, the results can do a complete 360 when staff delivers mediocre service.
Training restaurant employees can result in more satisfied customers, seamless operations, and excellent reviews.
Equipping your employees with restaurant training matters!
This blog talks about why restaurateurs who want to drive more revenue, keep customers happy, and gather more social proof should get restaurant employee management and training in order.
Here’s the Problem: Lack of Proper Training in Restaurant Staff
A significant problem in the restaurant industry is that proper training for restaurant employees can be overlooked.
When a new restaurant opens, management hires some thirty to forty employees and rigorously trains them on standard operating procedures. Within the next 30, 60, and 90 days, half of those staff either quit or are fired for lack of performance or attendance.
Fast forward six months after opening, the entire staff has completely turned over, and the training that vigorously took place at the beginning completely vanishes. Corporate trainers trained the first set of staff, but each training session for fresh recruits results in some communication loss, leading to less being retained.
Not only is this expensive for business, but it can also stall the progress of a restaurant.
The only consolation? This problem highlights the potential issues that can arise from employee mismanagement.
What Are the Solutions to This Problems?
Here’s how you can fix training issues with your restaurant staff:
Step 1: Creating Documentation
Within any growing business, the founding team members are the experts. However, it becomes impossible to train each new staff individually and consistently without proper documentation and standard operating procedures.
Creating written documentation and how-to guides is crucial to the success of any business beyond its founders when it scales. This is why many larger franchisees have onboarding training with every meal franchise owner.
Proper documentation should combine text, comparative images, and even videos. Note that some people learn better by reading, but others may learn better by watching, so cover all bases. Many tools help you with creating documentation; one example is bang tango for creating written documentation. Another excellent tool for recording your screen and video content is vimeo.com.
We like Vimeo better because it does not distract a user by showing advertising at the end of the video and the subscription packages are reasonably priced.
Step 2: Training and Compliance
Once your documentation has been created, it is vital to share that with your staff and hold them accountable for learning the material that is part of their job. This step can be a challenging task, considering the short attention span of individuals. Perhaps the most effective way is to create bite-sized content to keep their attention and to implement assessments such as quizzes and certifications to ensure compliance.
A great to hack is to create 101 guides for every position. The 101s will include all of the sub-assessments that must be completed for every position. This also helps keep the new employee focused and organized.
Step 3: Monitoring Feedback Loops
The next step is to have systems in place to monitor the effectiveness of your training programs. Such systems would include employee scheduling tools which should automatically measure the performance of each employee over a certain period. Such measurements would include the number of absences, no-shows, tardiness, and their overall satisfaction with their job. Another great tool is to use customer feedback to understand your employees’ performance from the customers’ point of view. Ultimately this is the most critical metric to monitor.
Simplify Employee Management and Training with Milagro
At Milagro, we understand that managing multiple platforms and constantly cross-referencing one day to say to another can’t be a hassle. This is why we built a complete restaurant operating system so that you would have all the data at your fingertips without having to run reports and waste time with manual labor.
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