By Christina Lundin
Back Of House (BOH) training may seem like a challenge, especially in the hustle and bustle of a busy kitchen or stock room. But, by leveraging your BOH signage and TVs, employee learning and training can be a consistent practice.
The right strategies and content can help you create engaging training materials for your team to use and implement in daily practice. Here’s how you can use digital signage to support your BOH team members!
Strategies All Successful Restaurants Should Use in Their BOH Training
With many different tactics on how to train staff, use something that will engage them and help remember the material they were taught!
Properly training your BOH staff is crucial for businesses to run smoothly, but to also help boost productivity and confidence in your employees. Image courtesy of Morton Food Service.
Finding the best and most effective ways to train staff that will keep them engaged throughout the entirety of it can be a challenge. Hospitality staff play a huge role in the industry by providing services or products for customers even if it is behind the scenes. Making sure that they know all of the proper safety and compliance guidelines while also perfecting their craft in their job position are crucial, and there are many strategies to make training more interactive and engaging.
Add Digital Signage and Shift as a Reliable Employee Engagement System That Makes a Difference
Every one of your employees will have a slightly different method of learning that works best for them. You can help your employees internalize your BOH training by providing it to them in a variety of ways.
Shift makes it easy to present BOH training that caters to a range of learning styles.
Canva is fully integrated in the Shift software, so it’s easy to create eye-catching content you can display on your BOH screens. You can incorporate infographics, images and written guides that can be shared in your kitchen. Scheduling tools make it easy to share information across your screens for each shift on a location-by-location basis. It keeps messaging and SOPs consistent across sites and shifts.
Not only this, but QR codes make it easy to put training and learning material in the palm of your employee’s hands. It makes it easy for them to review material and fill out forms at their convenience, without shift leaders or managers chasing them down.
Engaging Learning Materials
Gone are the days of involved all-day training meetings and outdated videos. Today’s training methods should strive to engage employees without cutting into workflows.
Upgrading the delivery of training videos and images is an easy way to elevate tried-and-true methods, with the added bonus of making that training material consistently available on screens. You can cycle specific training material through your BOH screens as needed, ensuring that your employees don’t need to wait for the next formal staff meeting for clarification.
The gamification of training is becoming increasingly popular, turning employee learning into games and quizzes that make learning material easier to absorb and retain. Managers can even make friendly competitions out of these training strategies, rewarding employees who score highest on safety quizzes or creating a contest across shifts. This encourages training completion and rewards retention.
Opportunities for Feedback
An employee engagement system such as Shift is a great tool to use to train hospitality staff, plus recognize and appreciate their hard work.
Ineffective training is useless. One of the most effective ways to find out how well your training is going is to gather feedback from your employees. They may be able to identify weaknesses in your training regimen that you may have missed.
Shift makes it easy to gather employee feedback with QR code campaigns. Connecting QR codes to online survey forms makes it easy for employees to use their own devices to fill out surveys that may go otherwise unnoticed.
It does need to be stressed that if you are going to solicit employee feedback, you also need to seriously consider and, if warranted, act upon that feedback.
Few things will damage an employee’s morale more than feeling that their opinion is being dismissed by their higher-ups, and doing so can cause difficulties in the workplace.
Flexible Training Schedules
Creating a training schedule can be extraordinarily difficult, especially when you have to consider multiple shifts and schedules.
Powering your BOH screens with the right digital signage software, like Shift, makes it easy to display training materials to all of your employees. You can schedule content across different shifts and at each of your locations, so everyone has access to the information they need.
You are also able to automatically schedule a rotation of information through the Shift software, ensuring that all your employees are current on your business’s policies.
This makes it easy to streamline your management’s communication efforts and keep procedures consistent across staff. It’s an easy way to address and solve the problem of miscommunication or scheduling conflicts.
Praise and Recognition
Training can become especially effective when you make a point of recognizing employees who are consistent leaders on your team.
Creating displays that celebrate ambition or congratulate success is an easy way to show your team members that you are invested in their performance. You can even use premade templates to celebrate milestones like birthdays and work anniversaries. A personalized message to recognize employees can go a long way in showing appreciation to your dedicated staff.
Strong Performance Metrics
Performance metrics can be used to identify areas of potential improvement and can also serve as accountability tools. Encouraging your employees to complete training and meet performance goals is easy with Shift!
With POS and/or LMS integration, Shift can display performance and sales metrics. These in turn can be used to determine the efficacy of any training employees have undergone.
The Right Tools Can Elevate Your Approach to BOH Training
Use a robust approach to support your BOH team members, which can make a difference in their job performance!
Knowing the right kind of technology and tools to keep your BOH staff properly trained is crucial to their happiness and the company’s success. Image courtesy of MarketMan.
The best strategies for BOH training take all of your employees’ needs into consideration. Your employees will each favor a different approach to learning, so the more of those approaches you can offer, the more effective your training will be.
The right training tool and delivery method should help you see a return on your investment, keep employees engaged and should be easy to maintain. A comprehensive digital signage software like Shift makes it easy to keep your staff informed without the need for involved meetings.
Clear Communication Throughout the Day
One of the most important things to do when training BOH staff is to ensure that you have all of the right tools you need to run a successful business. There are some key training concepts that are important to have within yourself as a manager, but also to instill in your staff too–but none compare to top-notch communication skills.
The most important tool to run a successful business is clear communication skills. By expressing to a staff member how well off a job they’re doing, providing constructive criticism, or to effectively tell employees key updates and changes in orders or how they can help you during a shift is crucial for the hospitality industry. This also helps to make sure that staff are set on a clear path of what their daily tasks and focus is to avoid any confusion throughout their shift.
Provide Health and Safety Compliance Information and Training
Something that every business in the hospitality industry should have knowledge of and become certified in is through health and safety compliance. This is a crucial certificate that helps to provide everything from hotels, restaurants, and even different venues to understand the legal standards of health and safety to protect not only customers, but staff as well.
There are a few different subjects that this certificate entails where it’s important for staff to also get the proper training on it as well. The health and safety compliance certificate covers everything from food safety, workplace safety, hygiene and sanitation, emergency plans and preparedness, and staff training to understand these topics.
This certificate is obtained through an auditor that can assess the workplace for any risks, verify through inspections everything from food and water analysis, and provide and issue the certificate to the business showing that they comply with Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) guidelines.
Inventory Management System Easily Accessible For Staff
Another tool that is useful for hospitality businesses to use to help lead their BOH staff towards success is an inventory management system. This is a useful management software that can help both restaurants and hotels keep track of their stock that can range from food, supplies, and even rooms available.
There are many inventory management systems that offer real-time tracking to see what you’re low or out of in order to stock up on supplies, along with accounting information, how to maximize profit feature, and even ways to prevent waste that can be easily accessible from a mobile device.
Figure Out What Works for Your Staff
Curious about which of your shared content is most effective? Use Shift’s insight and analytics tools to help you determine which elements of your training displays are most engaged with.
It makes it easy to identify which content goes unnoticed, so you can strategies the right delivery methods for your team. Insights and analytics report on a micro and macro level, so you can determine what screen usage looks like for each of your shifts and across each of your locations.
Shift Has the Tools You Need to Reinvent Your BOH Staff Training Strategy
Training your BOH staff is essential to make sure that they are better prepared to come to their job every day. With the right tools and strategies, hotels and restaurants in the hospitality industry are able to properly train their staff on food, health, and safety compliances, skills needed for their specific position, and ways to engage and keep them satisfied in their job position.
With so many tools at your disposal, Shift makes it as easy as turning on a screen to get your BOH employees on the same page. Schedule your free demo of Shift today to see how we can help you take your training to the next level!
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