Engage and Energize Your Staff with Restaurant eLearning
Published: 02/21/2011
Restaurant training hasn’t changed much in the past 30 years. Many restaurants use cumbersome training manuals that no one reads or remembers past their first day on the job; other restaurants have in-person training that is often inconsistent or incomplete.
As a restaurant owner or chain executive, how can you find new ways to engage your staff and get them up-to-speed on everything that they need to know to be successful – your restaurant’s brand and culture, food safety, customer service standards, and more?
eLearning is one of the most promising and still underutilized opportunities in the restaurant world.
RestaurantIt.com talked with Clay Hosh, Senior Instructional Designer, ServSafe, National Restaurant Association about some of the trends and benefits of eLearning for the restaurant industry.
“With restaurant eLearning, the opportunities are endless,” said Clay. “eLearning allows for a wide variety of teaching methods and activities, with fewer limitations than a traditional classroom or textbook – with eLearning, you can create simulations, games and interactive exercises, and allow students to learn from real-world scenarios – everything from hand washing to food prep.” With the fast pace of change in our industry, with the high rates of employee turnover that many restaurants experience, and with the ever-important need to keep costs low and keep training as effective as possible, in many ways the restaurant industry is ideally suited to use eLearning.
There are many reasons why restaurant operators and executives should use eLearning as part of their employee training programs:
• Standardized training: Instead of a personal training process that tends to turn into a game of “telephone” with each trainer delivering his/her own interpretation of the message, you can deliver a consistent, brand-compliant training session to every new employee you hire.
• Entertaining and engaging: Instead of a static book of text, statistics and the occasional diagram, you can create a more interactive type of training that involves active learning.
• Assess employees’ learning: eLearning makes it easy to track whether or not your employees are mastering the material – you can adjust your training (or devote additional training) to the subjects that pose the most challenge.
• Allows for remote and repeatable learning: eLearning is asynchronous and location independent – you don’t need to have all of your employees in the same room at the same time. Your staff can complete the learning modules at their own pace from any computer. eLearning is also easy to store and re-introduce for “refresher courses.”
• Audio and visual learning: eLearning is ideal for people with all types of learning styles – it makes it possible to include short video clips, audio recordings, colorful illustrations, and other features to keep the interest of your employees and ensure that the message gets through.
Clay Hosh mentioned McDonald’s and Chick-fil-A as two prominent restaurant chains that have been particularly active in introducing eLearning to their employees on a large scale.
“Overall, eLearning is still an emerging trend, but it’s going to keep getting bigger,” Clay said. “If you look at the changing demographics of the foodservice and restaurant industry workforce, we’re seeing a lot of younger employees who are more computer-savvy and who have grown up playing video games. These younger employees find eLearning to be much more appealing.”
The National Restaurant Association offers examples and demos of several eLearning courses at the ServSafe website:
• ServSafe Food Safety training
• ServSafe Starters food handler training