From Green To Great: How To Transform Your Trainees

Running a restaurant can come with a lot of responsibility. Not only do you need to ensure that the business is running well and making money, but you also have to keep your customers happy and the food quality good too. It can be a lot to manage at once. However, it will all get easier if you’re able to tackle at least one thing on your list. And one thing that can tick off a lot of requirements is to focus on training.

Restaurant productivity can often come down to your staff. If you want to ensure that your restaurant is running well, you need the right staff on your team. But that’s often easier said than done. However, it is possible to create an incredible service staff that will do your restaurant proud and allows for your business to blossom. So if you want to work on your new hires and ensure they can make your company great, here’s how to transform them.

Hire For Attitude

You know that great staff makes your business, so to ensure that you can work with the best team, you need to hire the right people from the start. It’s tempting to hire your staff based on their experience, but this isn’t always the best idea. Instead, you should focus on hiring for their attitude. As long as they’re of a legal working age and have document and identity verification, you can work on the rest. A great attitude can’t be taught, but skill can.

Set Your Expectations

One of the reasons your staff can seem to let you down is because they’re not entirely sure of what you expect. However, if you lay out very clear expectations not only with them, but with yourself, you’ll know what to look out for and how to keep your staff on track. You’ll also find that they’re more likely to stay on track in the first place too.

Stick To A Solid Training Plan

Next, you’re going to want to stick to a solid training plan. Creating a training plan is what will make or break your process here, and this sample can help. Trying to wing it will only backfire. You need to plan out clear action points and progression steps to ensure that your staff can learn everything they need to know and feel confident with the tasks they have at hand.

Provide An Encouraging Environment

But even the most fool-proof plan won’t be effective if you’re not giving your trainees the right environment. If you want your staff to flourish, their working atmosphere really matters. You need to be a kind, patient, and encouraging boss and your restaurant should follow suit. Ensure that they have an enjoyable, non-judging work place and you will find that they not only progress well, but they have fun with what they’re doing too.

Work Against Checkpoints

It’s also going to be a great help to everyone if you can have set checkpoints to stick to too. It’s hard to measure progress without them. With you have time-based points or knowledge-based ones, you and your staff members need to know when they need to assess how they’re doing, and then where they go from there.

Provide Rewards

When you have high expectations of your staff, it helps to provide rewards. Sometimes, salary isn’t incentive enough. Not everyone believes in incentives, but they are proven to work. So, if you want to work with killer incentives that get results, you need to think outside the box. Encourage their ideas, ask them for what they want, even give days off when they’re due. Just make sure that you’re encouraging your staff to do well with what you can offer.

Boost Morale

A supportive working environment and exciting rewards are all well and good, but you should also aim to keep staff morale high. To do this, you should emphasize teamwork and encourage your staff to bond, work well together, and even treat each other like a little family. So it’s important for everyone to be on the same page and feel as if they’re contributing to the business in some way.

Give Back

Finally, you should also aim to give back. It’s so easy for employers to think about what their staff can do for them, when really, they need to be thinking about what benefits their give to their staff. If you want good staff, you have to provide a reason for them to stick around. So make sure that you’re able to show them that you’re grateful, and that you appreciate all of their hard work.