1 in 3 Americans have their first job experience in restaurants and 6 in 10 adults have worked in restaurants at some point. Unfortunately, onboarding new hires quickly can be challenging.
Today, restaurant brands can not afford to have the added challenge of dealing with slow employee onboarding that can result in missed sales, poor customer service, and worse of all employee turnover.
1Huddle is the only competitive gaming platform that onboards new hires faster, upskills better, and fires up employees across the restaurant industry. Here are the 7 best practices that we see employed by leading restaurant brands across the globe.
1. Make training easy to create
The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in the largest layoff of Human Resources teams in recent memory. Brands can not just rely on 2-3 HR people that are responsible for a dozen people functions, including training. Restaurant leadership should invest in technology that makes it easy to author new training and communication content. There are many training and development platforms that have popped up recently that make this process easier for managers across the entire brand, not just HR.
2. Be mobile-first
Gone are the days where employee training should only be done with a manual or by watching boring videos on a tablet. With the mobility and speed of today’s workforce, restaurants must make sure their technology is not just mobile-friendly but is mobile-first to deliver a premium learning experience to every worker, regardless of where they are.
3. Level Up Managers
The world needs better coaches.
Leading brands turn managers into effective coaches by freeing up managers’ time and helping them understand what their workers are struggling with.
Instead of relying on one-time evaluations to see how team members are doing, managers use technology, not just their gut, to help their team continuously level up.
4. Develop Every Worker
No role should be treated less equally. You are a team. A major challenge with restaurants today is that training, coaching, and mentorship opportunities are reserved for a few key roles and limited to others. Make sure that 100% of your training, coaching, and learning opportunities are available to every worker regardless of role or ethnicity. This will result in a faster onboarding time for not just new hires but for existing workers that may be promoted into new roles across your brand.
5. Pay a living wage
If you think raising wages is costly, compare that to what slow employee onboarding programs will cost you! Slow onboarding can hit you hard (more time in training, more people administering training, and higher risk of employee turnover), so it’s better for your brand to be proactive in raising wages to better compete and take care of your people.
6. Know your employees ‘why’
Get to know your people! The manager in any organization plays an important role and can make the most significant impact on a worker’s desire to stay connected and work hard. Restaurant leadership should impress upon their front-line managers that they should focus on connecting with workers beyond just punch-in and punch-out.
7. Know how learning works
Do you want your organization’s training to stick?
The reality is: Most training doesn’t work. Employees forget 70% of what they learn within just three days when using traditional learning platforms like LMS, and 87% is forgotten within a month.
This is why you should work hard to make sure what you are teaching is rooted in leading brain science and cognitive research on how learning works. Your end goal is to make sure your employees always do the right thing, the right way, at the right time, every time.
(BTW — companies using 1Huddle saw an 83% increase in sales performance after using our games to upskill for work)
Jobs and the restaurant workforce are rapidly changing, and companies are struggling to find workers who can keep up. We built 1Huddle to be a continuous development tool so workers can level up and reskill year-round.
The workers who will succeed in the future of the restaurant industry are the workers who treat learning and development as a lifelong process. By giving your workers the tools, ability, and freedom to continually upskill and engage with all types of content, you can prepare every member of your team to level up for the workforce of today and the workforce of the future.
If you want to learn more about how 1Huddle can help power your workforce (and reduce employee turnover). Try out our game-based platform here.
