Successful restaurant teams: how to train them

Managed to find the right people for the team that will work the floor? That's already a big part of the journey… but training them can be hard. The rest of the trail is all uphill, but don't sweat it — we'll make it easy for you!

How do you set goals so everyone is on the same page? Not to mention that, given the number of job openings in this market, sometimes retaining employees ends up being the hardest part. Aí você fica em dúvida: run training that is simple and to the point, so that any new server can get up to speed quickly, or; invest in a benefits plan to retain talent? So, the fire or the frying pan?

If you picked the first one, keep reading for some valuable tips on how to train employees, and if you're interested you can also download the ebook we wrote about it by clicking the button below. As for the second one, we'll talk later!

Leia também: Restaurant work schedules: 5 tips for building one

Checklist: how to train employees in restaurants and bars

A long title only helps you, who are looking for solutions to your problems, find the right answers! Here goes the checklist.

Focus on the relationship between your employee and the customer

Like it or not, the best showcase for your business is your customers. If they leave satisfied, both with the food and with the service (that is, with your operation), they'll recommend the restaurant to their friends and to the whole network of people they know, whether through good old word of mouth or its digital cousins: Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

Who is the best person to make your customers' experience as good as it can be? You already know this, but just to reinforce it: it's your employees.

Before you put them to work, teach them that hitting back never helps, not even when it's a matter of getting even.

If you have questions about consumer rights, read our post! If you don't know how to prepare your establishment to avoid dismissals for cause, read this article.

Knowing this, equip your team to solve problems

First, your team needs to understand the right way to interact with customers. Second, they need to be able to solve your customers' problems, or at least point them to the right person to do so.

Your servers are the front line of your operation. They have direct contact with your customers, so they need to understand your business well enough to help when a problem comes up. If they don't care about your business, your customer will notice.

In other words, all the work you did back in the first tip to make sure everything runs by the highest standards of courtesy goes down the drain the moment the customer thinks your employee isn't able to help.

Standardize the approach and attitude when serving customers

This standardization helps with the other points, and also with training the future employees who will pass through your establishment until you build the right team. Standardizing doesn't mean stripping all the personality out of your employees until they turn into robots — it means standardizing the way they approach your customers, before letting their personality show.

Why is this important? Many people carry barriers of all kinds, for reasons as varied as the colors of the butterflies in Brazilian wildlife. Everyone carries the mark left by their life experiences, and that is something to be respected.

Not to mention that, as luck would have it, that customer may have fought with the boss, taken an earful from the mother-in-law, and on top of that forgotten to buy their kid's book because of the traffic on the way home. You may not have done anything, but they're just waiting for one wrong move to unleash the dragon on someone.

Learn more: How do you create a customer service manual?

Create routines, and reinforce them whenever possible

If you don't have a standard for safety and cleaning routines, as well as special guidance for customers, your operation will turn into a raffle, where everyone who doesn't draw the prize-winning employee ends up with the incompetent one.

Worse still, it isn't even a matter of the employee's competence: the customer who comes back may have liked the way they were served so much that being served differently could disappoint them. Every touchpoint with your customer is something you can organize and build a process around, showing your team the way you would like to be served every time you went to the restaurant.

Not to mention that, without routines, there will always be that slacker who would rather serve new customers than clear the table after the ones already served leave. Avoid internal and external problems — prioritize processes!

Because, with processes, you can create metrics. With metrics, you can build a history. And with that history, you can set goals to grow your business! If you want to read more about this subject, click here.

Invest in the professional development of your employees

A happy employee is a valuable employee, because happiness is contagious. If you can keep your service team motivated, you'll manage to turn your establishment into a home — that's how cozy and welcoming it will be!

To keep your team motivated, invest in performance-based benefit plans – always remembering that the plan has to pay for itself -; workshops for the different areas; partnerships with language schools; among many others. The limits of motivation are the limits of imagination!

The ideal is to start with things that will improve their performance in their own areas. If the drinks at your establishment aren't coming out the way you wanted, run a mixology workshop for your bar staff. If you film and photograph the course and share the content on the right channels, the results will come! You just have to be motivated (to motivate them!)

Marketing and sales courses for waiters always help too. At the end of the day, learning the theory behind selling makes it easier to understand and practice the methods that will influence your revenue!

All this to say…

… That you'll find these and other tips in the ebook we made so you can really structure your operation and boost sales! In this post we've gathered only a few, with a brief explanation of each, but in the ebook itself you'll find all of them, with details on how to organize processes, the types of interaction you should reinforce between your employees and customers, and many other tips!

Sounds straight to the point, doesn't it? Well, that's exactly how the training and the guidelines you'll use should be, both for training new employees – and refreshing the old ones. In the training itself, you can hand out a flyer with the “rules” of whatever code of conduct you want, so your servers always have it on hand if they need it.

Download the COMPLETE GUIDE now: Customer Service Training