There’s an old restaurant saying: “Guests don’t care about what you know — they only care about what you do!” And, really, it’s not what you do. It’s almost entirely what your employees do. Your restaurant training objectives go a long way in determining the level of service and quality of product your guests receive. If your objectives are well-defined and you’ve covered all the bases, your guests will like what you and your servers are doing.
Define Your Restaurant Training Objectives
Your training objectives answer this all-important question: “Why am I doing this?” Knowing the answer to this also determines which employees need new training. A word of caution: Don’t plan to take on a total revamp of every position in your restaurant all at once. This is a process. Start with one position, define objectives, plan the training, and move on to the next position.
Defining objectives identifies gaps between current performance and expected standards and demonstrates whether or not training will address those gaps. The information generated will also be useful when measuring your training program’s effectiveness. It can also help justify additional spending on training or just make your existing training program more cost effective.
As you define your restaurant training objectives, be both specific and assertive in describing the tasks and expected standards. Vague, wishy-washy directives only confuse people.
- Don’t say: Servers will understand the menu.
- Do say: Servers will be able to verbally describe menu items to inquiring customers.
- Don’t say: Servers will know menu abbreviations and how to ring up food items.
- Do say: Server will pass written test on menu abbreviations and demonstrate how to correctly enter all orders into the POS.
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