Training your staff is one of those things you know you should do, but running a restaurant doesn’t give you much wriggle room to fit it in.
Restaurants face unique challenges when it comes to training. First, you have a range of training needs: basic training, front-of-house training, back-of-house training, tech training, DEI training, and bar training. Second, with staff turnover rates in food and hospitality at around 70% (even up to 130%) per year in the US, it’s easy to get discouraged. Why spend time and money training someone likely to quit soon?
Combine these challenges with the flat-out, frantic pace of restaurant work, and training can easily take a back seat. The problem is that training is the best way to ensure consistent quality of service, customer satisfaction, and compliance with local regulations. It’s also a fantastic way to fight against staff turnover.
The benefits of training your staff far outweigh the challenges. And now AI is here to help you through the process. Read on to learn how AI can help you train your restaurant staff.
5 ways AI can take work off your plate and level up your staff training
Here are some ways AI can make a massive impact on your staff training.
1. Easier training hybridization
Any successful training strategy requires both in-person and digital learning. You most likely already conduct some sort of in-person training, like onboarding.
Face-to-face learning allows staff to learn in a real environment. It’s good for team bonding — giving new staff a chance to interact with their experienced colleagues and get immediate, valuable feedback.
But it’s hard to fit in schedules. For it to work, multiple people need to have spare time and be in the same location. Because of this, you might do it on the fly — fitting it in when you can. Ad hoc training like this is difficult to keep consistent.
Digital training, on the other hand, can be standardized to create a base level of knowledge for all. It’s an accessible and flexible complement to all-important face-to-face.
Combining digital and in-person training is a powerful way to reinforce knowledge so your staff can perform at their best. AI-powered training tools enable you to do both simultaneously and easily, with features that support the quick digitization of assets.
For example, with AI training software, you need only to drag and drop the PDF training materials you already have for auto-conversion into bite-sized, digital formats. The AI does the heavy lifting, transforming your text-based document into an engaging digital version for quick consumption.
AI-enabled training digitization improves the efficiency of training for both parties - less of their time is spent completing training, and less of yours is spent creating training and reinforcing information.
Jason Trail, the training and development manager at McCoy’s Building Supply, used eduMe AI to achieve exactly this, and “take documents [they] were using, pop them in [the PDF converter]” to generate a course really quickly.”
The result? McCoy’s hybridized training “ “in a matter of minutes versus days or weeks.”
2. Fast creation of digital lessons and courses from scratch
Designing a training program and creating materials for dozens of staff takes time, a commodity most restaurant teams are low on. When you’re time-strapped, sharing a lesson on a new bussing technique can wait—even if colleagues at other branches are seeing success with it.
Unfortunately, when training is infrequent, learners (your staff) miss out on all the benefits of continuous learning. Benefits like boosting knowledge retention, decreasing staff turnover, and engaging and motivating your staff.
With AI, “not having enough time to make training materials” isn’t going to stop you from giving your staff continuous learning from a well-thought-out training program. Gone are the days of staring at a blank page, - with AI as your training creation assistant, training material no longer needs building from the bottom-up, from scratch. In fact, AI-supported training creation can help restaurant teams reduce training production time by 70%.
AI also allows you to support training needs when they appear more effectively. Let’s say a hygiene issue pops up in the front of house — a customer complains a menu is sticky and their table wasn’t clean. You can use AI-enabled solutions to put together material on your company’s process to send out as a reminder in a fraction of the time.
As a result, you can enjoy the best of both - you can plan ahead more easily and formalize a training strategy. But, you also create content to provide in-the-moment support, helping you take control of any problems that crop up.
3. Enhanced training quality with AI-suggested updates
Finding the time to create the training is hard enough. When will you find the time to review employee performance on a module, source qualitative and quantitative feedback, and rework it to make a better version for future use??
Given the bottlenecks L&D teams encounter when creating a steady stream of content, it’s even more unlikely they possess the time or resources to optimize existing content.
AI-powered training software can not only assist with creation, but optimization. AI will analyze the content for things like readability, length, structure, assessment difficulty, and assign the material a ‘Content Quality score.’ The quality score comes alongside a series of suggestions for improvement to make the lesson more impactful.
In this way, the right training tool can help you deliver the highest quality training — without a huge time commitment.
4. Localized training content for multiple locations
Staff in many restaurants come from all over the world and speak different languages natively. For example, you might have English and Spanish speakers in a single location. If you’re a big enough chain, you may also have locations in multiple markets with multiple languages in each location.
Sure, you can outsource the translation—but how do you check the quality if you don’t speak the language it’s translated into? More outsourcing? Here’s what the process can look like for L&D teams at the moment:
1. Training is created in the primary language.
2. The content is sent to a third-party translation service after it’s been formatted for localization (if you're really unlucky, that could mean copying and pasting your content sentence by sentence into a spreadsheet).
3. Wait for the content to be returned. Check the quality of the translation. If your knowledge of the second language is limited, you may need to hire another third party to cross-check. Upload the content to your system, checking between the translations that the placement of the translated text is correct.
Even with translation outsourced to experts, it’s hard to control how conversational the translation is or whether technical terminology is correct. And unless you’re confident in the language, too, it’s hard to be sure you’re uploading it correctly.
AI-powered training software translates and creates a copy of a lesson or course in any language you need training in. It may not yet be foolproof, but presents owners of training a way to get from point A to B faster, and more reliably, than ever before.
When learners access the training content, they can toggle to choose their preferred language. They get training material they understand in just a few swipes or clicks.
5. Personalized learning
Training is all about addressing your staff’s weaknesses. But with the revolving-door turnover in restaurants, dozens of staff working under you, and zero spare time, when can you find the time to figure out what your staff needs to learn?
You don’t have the time to tailor your training to your staff’s needs. But doing something is better than nothing, right? Canned content at least addresses broad informational needs, without you having to do much.
The problem is that training needs are unique, so generic materials don’t speak directly to the individuals on your team.
Let’s say you have 5 new front-of-house hires. They won’t necessarily be starting from the same point of knowledge. There is branch-specific information they need to know, but individually, they have different strengths and weaknesses. Delivering identical training to each ignores this, and their individual weaknesses will remain weaknesses.
There’s a better way.
AI can analyze staff performance, skill gaps, and knowledge to give them targeted training. People only do the training they need, saving time and resources. Before AI, this was painstaking. You’d need to conduct individual skill gaps analysis and then create tailored materials to address them—realistically, it’s too time-consuming for busy L&D teams. With AI, though, it’s automatic.
Use AI to optimize your training process
Training your restaurant staff means consistent, high-quality service, happy, engaged staff, and compliance with local regulations. But it’s a time-consuming process. And with the day-to-day in a restaurant being so hectic, it’s hard to find the time to do it.
Why not let AI optimize your staff training? Discover how eduMe AI transforms staff training with speedy content creation, easy digitization features, multi-language translation, quality checks and feedback, and personalized learning.
Get in touch with us now!
