Friday, October 27 2023
Managing restaurant staff is a full-time job. Whether you’re a restaurant owner or floor manager, ensuring your staff is trained and ready for any customer interaction is a crucial component of the job. Hiring the right staff is the place to start. From there, implementing regular restaurant staff training keeps you primed for brunch hours, dinner rushes, and everything in between.
Culinary Staffing is here to help! Utilize these restaurant staff training solutions and support tools to prepare your staff for every customer request. Hire from our pool of qualified front-of-house and back-of-house staff to fill your employee roster with skilled workers with verified training.
Among your restaurant staff training solutions, these requirements are a must:
When you start with these foundational staff training requirements it sets the table to save time and effort when it comes to effective training.
When you implement our restaurant staff training solutions they allow you to achieve team goals with ease. Some of those goals to work toward include:
Ultimately when your staff training is disciplined and precise, it gives you the freedom to create a better customer dining experience. These improvements benefit your staff, your customers, and your bottom line.
Use these eight tips for restaurant staff training to build your training program from the ground up:
Your foremost task is providing access to training programs that align with your restaurant’s vision. Ensuring you have in-house access to training and connections to required food handling courses bolsters your ability to fine tune your training program.
2. Organize Specific Front-of-House and Back-of-House Training
Your front-of-house staff needs training in customer service, managing front-of-house duties, and maintaining professional presentation. These tasks include learning your restaurant’s best practices for keeping work areas neat, practicing how to best handle complicated customer situations, and processing monetary transactions such as splitting checks, or how to accept multiple forms of payment on a single bill.
Back-of-house staff training complements front-of-house work but is a world away from customers. For your back-of-house employees, focus on training that emphasizes food and health safety standards, meal preparation, and top-tier plating techniques that match your restaurant’s aesthetic.
The final component for keeping your back-of-house staff cool when the kitchen gets hot is ensuring consistent training with clearly defined expectations for each position. Within that practice, include cross-training for when staffing is tight, and how to communicate under pressure if a situation is less than ideal to keep everyone working in sync.
Delegation is a fundamental rule of management and training. The more you can trust your restaurant to run smoothly, the more time you have to work on new customer acquisition strategies.
Promote a self-contained training program by empowering your best employees to help onboard and assist in training new hires. One way to do this is by selecting your most efficient, hard-working staff for supervisory roles.
As you integrate restaurant staff training solutions one task that can be easily overlooked is dedicated training time for ensuring consistent delivery of your restaurant’s aesthetics and design. These questions will get your head in the design space:
Ensuring your brand guidelines are clearly defined in your employee training manual with specific time set aside for practice is the ticket to success. Doing so guarantees all employees can follow your restaurant’s recipe for perfect design etiquette.
Be concise with the information you include in your employee training manual. The more thorough you are, the more helpful the manual will be for you and your staff! Foundational sections are the most important to start with, including opening and closing procedures for front-of-house and back-of-house staff as well as the protocol for guest greeting, seating, and times for eating.
Be precise about uniform rules and professional presentation. Include information on how staff scheduling is planned, how your POS system operates, and the correct order for customer inquiry and delegation of management responsibilities.
A key selling point throughout your guest’s dining experience is your staff’s ability to pair any plate with a complementary beverage, be it a glass of wine or a perfect craft cocktail. Servers do not need sommelier-levels of knowledge. An in-depth understanding of the menu and your patron’s palate, however, adds greater depth to the customer experience and is an easy way to generate additional revenue.
Make sure your staff are knowledgeable about your seasonal menu items that highlight specific, unique ingredients and their perfect pairings.
Emphasize the customer experience by placing value on their feedback. By consistently incorporating customer feedback into your daily operational practices you demonstrate a commitment to the highest level of dining experience. Things to consider:
When you receive customer feedback that can be immediately implemented by your staff, update your training plans to reflect your customer’s needs and incorporate it into regular staff communications. Your customer’s experience will improve and so will your profits!
When it comes to training your staff, there is a delicate balance between quality instruction and your profit margin for time spent. Implement technology when applicable for standard practices that do not affect your restaurant’s aesthetic and enjoyment of the customer’s experience.
Training modules on a staff computer to learn how to run your restaurant’s POS system or
required food safety courses are examples of tech implementation to help make training more efficient.
The schedule of restaurant staff training includes a few timelines: Initial training for new hires followed by regular training sessions each quarter for your more seasoned staff. Quarterly training could include refreshers of the basics. It’s also an ideal time to roll out any new restaurant plans and incorporate customer feedback in addition to implementing updates for the service industry as a whole.
The more deliberate you are about how time is spent training staff, the less time you will have to spend on staffing solutions later. Our answers to these FAQs provide additional foundational support for designing a training program that covers the basics with plenty of room for customization.
Training restaurant employees effectively encompasses general practices and nuanced restaurant-specific tricks and tools. Train your staff for food and safety standards, ensure they know your restaurant’s clientele to solidify service skills, and clearly define roles to support efficient task management.
Provide training on where unique ingredients or specialty menu items come from, highlighting the ingredients’ quality and handling–such as farm-to-table distribution. Practice giving tasting notes that give drink and dessert pairings a delicious story, and include tips suited to your location to help staff navigate your unique clientele’s needs. These higher standards of training keep your restaurant standing out from the rest of your competition.
There isn’t one single most important type of training. Any servers that only have experience with a single form will have lacking customer service skills with a lot left to be desired. Several of the most important training subjects to cover are:
Servers help facilitate the perfect dining experience. Emphasizing customer-based practices for these employees that revolve around creating an immersive dining experience, knowing the menu in detail, and maintaining the correct dining atmosphere are at the top of their training list.
The best way to plan staff training is with the vision you have for your restaurant in mind. Start by running a SWOT analysis as it pertains to your staffing and customer service. Doing so can help prevent staffing shortages in a busy season or help mitigate waste. Define your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Then you can determine how your staff can best enhance your strengths, eliminate weaknesses, and help your restaurant reach its potential. This could include training floor supervisors to delegate tasks and explain specific standards. Make sure to include your restaurant’s specifics in your training program’s design first.
After you’ve organized the program with what you need, you can fit the food and safety standards and business-specific needs where they belong. General training for safety standards is for everyone. Management and technology tasks will be specific for supervisors.
Six techniques to master managing a restaurant are:
These practices will improve the restaurant experience for you, your employees, and your customers!
Incorporating these eight restaurant staff training solutions into your training program helps to ensure your restaurant is managed by the best staff for the job. Hiring the right people will aid in that initiative. Culinary Staffing can help you there! Contact our staffing experts today to bring in pre-interviewed, qualified professionals to raise your restaurant standards.
