Staff training doesn’t have to take you lots of time. Just ten-minute sessions and repeat them with small group when they are available, you can better your employee training in a matter of minutes.
Spending about 10 minutes on each of these activities:
1. Kitchen priorities are often product knowledge, technique and speed. Avail a picture book of ingredients or a quick Google search to show ingredients you don’t have on hand. Also, in a short session, you can just look at one particular skill – for example, filleting and boning, chiffonade, dicing. Use the timers to see how long it takes to prepare some amount of product, with cheering and prizes when the goal is attained.
2. Costing and numbering skills may be one weakness of your staff. Then short sessions with calculations will be helpful – how much yield you can get from trimming strip of meat, how to cost a recipe, calculating menu profits or multiplying quantities. As your employees often have a calculator on their phone, let them practice with it. Otherwise, you can let your staff complete some simple spreadsheet examples that you set up on the iPad.
3. In the bar, training sessions should cover the origins of different beers, wines or spirits. For example, gin is flavoured with juniper, hazelnuts flavor Frangelico, but what are they? Beer origins and the traditions in these countries will be helpful for imported stock and details about different beer style. Utilize an atlas, Google Maps or one popular alcohol-oriented iPad apps when training your employees.
4. Why not train your waiters as so-called amateur psychologists. Give fun names to customer types, and then have your staff work out the specific needs of ‘ladies who lunch’, ‘first daters’, ‘romantic lovers’, ‘workaholic’ , ‘young business dudes’, etc. It would help hone their observation skills and make them understand more people different to themselves.
5. Product knowledge is crucial – what do your staff know about various types of vegetables, seafood, herbs and spices, meat? Tastings will be really important this case. Sessions can be as simple as a chocolate test, lettuce tasting, or a comparison of berry flavours. Also, when the chef is making a sauce or cake, it is good timing to have 2 staff watching how it is done.
6. Ask your staff to check online review sites to see what your customer feedback on the food, venues is and how it is being handled.
7. Short quizzes are such a great coaching tool. 100% correct is expected. Quiz examples can be ’20 facts about Chinese food’. Another nice quiz for front and back of the house is ’20 difficult situations’. They can be: ‘A customer’s only credit card is declined, and they have no cash. What would you do?”, “A customer returns the fish as she is upset that it has a head on it. What would you do?” When your staff answers correctly, they can get such awards as receiving full tips.
8. Your suppliers can help your staff training, too. If you have an amiable butcher, they may be willing to have one employee of yours watching when they cut up carcasses. The wine reps may be happy to help with product tastings though, don’t allow it to be just a tour of their newest or drinking spree.
Now record and celebrate what you do. Take photos and write some sentences about your staffing training on the website, Facebook page. Positive impressions can be made in various different ways.
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