How to Create A Restaurant Training Program For Employees

There are many ways to create a restaurant training program for employees. A properly-trained restaurant staff saves owners time and money, as well as increases profitability. Restaurant owners maximize the quality of their food and service to customers by ensuring continuous, robust training of hosts, managers, as well as wait and kitchen staff. As a restaurant HR professional, work with reputable and professional trainers to significantly increase customer service quality, maximize collaboration, and reduce injury risk. Read on to discover how to create a restaurant training program for employees.

Training Videos

Creating robust training videos is a prudent first step in creating a solid restaurant training program. The audio-visual interactions keep prospective staff members engaged when discussing mandatory topics such as policy and legal considerations. Additionally, employees familiarize themselves with various menu items and view step-by-step guides on how to prepare certain menu dishes. Moreover, these management leadership training options can be viewed outside of working hours. This way, video training supplements daily training without impacting employee productivity. Surely, creating robust training videos is a first step in making a restaurant training program that provides supplemental training.

Peer Guidance And Observation

Second, implement peer guidance and observation into your training program. Ensure your more experienced staff members are observing and guiding the new and current staff. This helps track whether newer employees are practicing what they’re learning. Often, smaller restaurants lack the staff numbers for assigning each new employee their own experienced trainer. Therefore, the best way to ensure robust training for new employees is typically to assign them to one designated supervisor. Absolutely, peer guidance and observation provides reinforcement of initial training.

Set Goals

Setting training goals is a third step in creating a restaurant training program that sets a standard for your employees to meet. This maintains the consistency of your training program and ensures every new employee gets the same training. Additionally, create training benchmarks so employee training progress can be tracked. Provide a training team schedule app to guarantee your employees reach each training benchmark. Depending on the type and service style of your restaurant, sample schedules typically last 1-2 weeks. Certainly, setting goals enables robust tracking of your employees’ training progress.

Menu Training

Fourth, train employees on your establishment’s menu. Since food and drink are your main products at a restaurant, employees need to be experts on the menu. Additionally, they need to be prepared to answer any customer questions about the menu and its items. Help your employees understand the menu better by providing thorough definitions of each item on the menu itself. This way, waitstaff can refer to the menu when suggesting alternatives, and customers will have less questions. Definitely, providing menu training and descriptive information maximizes the customer service potential of your employees.

Effective Manual Writing

Lastly, take all your training knowledge and write down an effective training manual. These manuals need to have an overview of the training process’s length, what trainees will be doing every day, and detailed breakdowns of each step. For example, include photos or diagrams how to set up tables. Additionally, include procedures for greeting guests, taking orders, running food, and pre-bussing tables. Ideally, employees should take their manuals home and refer to them as reinforcement of what they’ve learned that day. These manuals can also cover compliance training as well. Moreover, update your training manuals periodically, so they can scale and change with your business.

There is a myriad of methods to create a restaurant training program for employees. One method involves robust training videos as the first step, showing employees boring legal and policy considerations, as well as visualizing how dishes are made. Second, peer guidance and observation ensures trainees are applying what they’ve learned. Third, set goals to track the training progress of new employees. Menu training significantly increases the customer service potential of each employee. Finally, capturing all this knowledge in an effective training manual provides a record of robust training methods that scales and changes with your restaurant. When considering how to create an effective restaurant training program, consider the points listed above.