Let’s start with a question: what can you do to revolutionise your restaurant employee onboarding process?
Welcoming new restaurant employees is not just about filling positions; it is a fundamental phase that sets the tone for an employee’s entire journey within any company. Doing it right can lead to a more engaged workforce, with increased productivity and higher retention rates.
Training staff is an essential factor to be able to compete with advantage. Having an effective, attractive and immersive learning experience for employees is what technology offers us. MobieTrain has identified the key principles that can make the onboarding process successful. In this article, we’ll explore how we can transform how we bring new talent into our organization with the best tech.
First, we must give the appropriate level of importance to the onboarding role if we want to achieve a strong workforce. Welcoming a new employee is not about shaking their hand but providing them with the necessary tools to develop professionally and contribute to the business’s success.
Company culture, safety, customer service… There is so much content that your new employee must learn in record time, and that is why it is so important that the content be simple, fast and easy to learn.
It has been proven that 90% of workers decide to leave or stay in the company in their first six months. If workers leave in the first few months, a very important economic cost is generated that must be avoided as far as possible.
Create a better restaurant employee onboarding experience to reduce turnover
Employee turnover in the restaurant industry is among the highest across all industries. Easter, Christmastime, summer, festivals… hospitality and restaurant businesses face a major challenge: finding the necessary personnel for their establishments every time these events approach.
While almost every restaurant owner struggles with high turnover, few realize the impact of onboarding on employee retention.
Having the onboarding process established, mechanized and digitized will help us focus on other tasks that are also vitally important for the business’s success. We will also improve customer satisfaction if we have properly onboarded and well-trained staff. They will provide your customers with a superior experience compared to poorly-trained staff.
The lack of personnel
Considering the lack of personnel in the sector in many areas, it is crucial that, once we have captured a candidate’s attention, we ensure that they continue to feel attracted and motivated to work in our business. But how do we make the staff fall in love so they decide to continue supporting our project?
We can start by building a comprehensive onboarding program with a curriculum that introduces company culture and values, compliance training (health, safety, and hygiene), job-specific training, and customer service and communication skills. MobieTrain will use all this content to define and create engaging training modules for onboarding efficiency through its technology.
High workloads, tight schedules, no space for study… Traditional training becomes an ordeal for employees, who generally neither take advantage of it nor apply it as they should. Technology helps to make up for these shortcomings in the sector. It gives us a new space to teach our employees our corporate culture, in-depth knowledge of the menu and the processes of preparing dishes, change management, compliance, incorporation, sales and customer experience, etc.
Involving HR and Operations in the restaurant employee onboarding
It is vitally important to create a good onboarding plan in which HR and Operations department managers are involved and aware of the importance of onboarding. We need HR’s point of view to streamline the process so that everything makes sense, and they will be the ones who decide the definition of onboarding.
MobieTrain will work closely with HR, providing us with the employee documentation and compliance to create engaging training modules based on gamification and microlearning techniques. Our platform engages your team by encouraging and connecting them with the company and each other.
The Operations department must also be involved in the employee onboarding process since they will be its references, especially in practical training. It is the moment for an active learning approach where employees gain knowledge and skills through direct experience and practice, often using tools or equipment rather than just listening, reading and gaming.
The involvement of Operations will increase the new employee’s active listening skills and improve their ability to make decisions in crisis situations, in addition to reinforcing discipline.
Only in this way can we reach the full integration of new hires into daily operations.
How can we measure the success of the restaurant employee onboarding?
Our team loves using data and metrics to show you that MobieTrain´s program works.
We use key performance indicators to say our solutions can double the speed of information transfer, increase employee knowledge retention by 50 per cent and multiply your involvement and commitment rate by four. MobieTrain also provides your company with time-to-productivity metrics and customer satisfaction surveys. The opinion of new employees is gold for us, which is why we are in contact with them to find out if the training is working and to ensure that they understand it and take advantage of it.
This is how we make continuous adjustments to improve the efficiency of our solution. We are attentive to future trends in the restaurant world to create employee onboarding that adapts to the needs of each moment. We look for sustainable and ecological training initiatives with a diverse onboarding for a multigenerational workforce.
Of course, it is important to pay attention to the development of new technologies and determine which ones can contribute the most to microlearning in the digital environment of a restaurant.
