Restaurant Employee Training Checklist

Did you know that service quality is one of the main factors that influence client satisfaction? Happy customers are more likely to come back and recommend your restaurant to others. On the other hand, people who were disappointed by the service may leave negative reviews.

As your employees are the ones responsible for the restaurant service, you must ensure they are doing the best job possible. For this, you need to constantly offer them training that develops their skills and helps them acquire valuable knowledge.

This restaurant employee training checklist will help you create a cohesive and easy-to-follow plan:

Hiring the most competent candidates is just the first step. Even if staff members have prior restaurant working experience, training can make the difference between a productive employee and one who struggles at their job.

Here are the benefits of creating a restaurant employee training checklist:

• Makes it easier to achieve the training goal: training sessions are most efficient when they focus on a single goal and have an easy-to-follow checklist that provides employees with the necessary information;
• Increased employee retention rate: the restaurant industry is known for having a problem with retaining staff. This comes with higher costs linked to the constant search for new employees. If you provide adequate training, employees know their responsibilities and are more likely to perform better at their jobs;
• Increased customer satisfaction: employees who are constantly trained have the knowledge to offer outstanding service that creates an unforgettable experience for every client. This will also lead to a bigger number of loyal customers and positive reviews;
• Increased employee satisfaction: in training, you show employees how to solve problems and who they can turn to if they encounter a problem. This removes some of the stress from their jobs and boosts satisfaction rates among staff;
• Decrease the risk of food-safety related problems: a food-borne illness can make customers sick and lead to big fines, a blow to your reputation and even closure. With proper training, every employee knows the food and safety procedures and follows them to prevent any incidents.

We’ve created a restaurant employee training checklist that will help you prepare staff members so they can feel confident in their skills and knowledge.

There are a lot of errors and problems that can occur if you don’t set up restaurant standard operating procedures, such as:

• Inconsistent food quality that disappoints clients;
• Food waste as a result of mismanaged restaurant inventory;
• Food preparation conflicts when employees don’t know their tasks.

If you want to avoid all the issues above and more, identify all the tasks performed at your business and create procedures on how each of them should be handled. Use easy-to-understand language and include the following food and beverage training topics:

• Facility and equipment: how to use, clean, and maintain equipment, what is the dishwashing process, who handles pest control, etc;
• Staff hygiene: accepted uniforms, how to clean hands, protective measures, chain of command;
• Food handling and preparation: standard recipes for every item, how to prepare each dish, how to handle separate working stations and much more;
• Customer interaction: how to greet and interact with customers, how to handle upset clients, who they can turn to if they can’t solve a client-related problem.

To ensure all standard operating procedures are followed, you should have consistent training sessions and materials that employees can rely on if they forget some of the instructions.

Some customers will inquire about the menu items: are they spicy? What is the flavor profile? Will this main go with that side? What dessert do you recommend? Employees will have a hard time making recommendations if they have only seen the menu in passing.

That’s why menu knowledge should be a key point of your restaurant employee training checklist. Getting employees to memorize the menu items can be a first step, but the best way to get them to remember them is by allowing staff members to experience the dishes.

Guided by the chef, each employee can taste and identify the flavors in each dish so they can make knowledgeable recommendations when customers ask for them.

If you’re searching for restaurant training ideas for new hires, don’t forget about the opening and closing procedures. Your senior employees have become experts at them by now, but new staff must get acquainted with their new responsibilities.

You can have the manager describe why each task is important and demonstrate how to properly perform it. Here are some examples:

• Wiping down and cleaning equipment at the end of their shift;
• Cleaning tables and restocking tabletop items at opening and closing;
• Setting tables at the start of the day;
• Stocking glassware for easy reach.

An efficient restaurant is one that can rely on innovative technology, like the GloriaFood POS system. With an easy set-up, it enables staff members to place orders and accept orders fast, increasing client satisfaction in the process.

The GloriaFood POS system is the ideal choice for you and your employees because:

• It is intuitive to use: it has a customized dashboard with color-coded categories and menu items so employees can find the dishes instantly;

• Allows you to add, remove, and update employee information in just a few clicks: so you can get new hires ready to start working in no time;

• It has a training module: no need to spend hours trying to teach the new employees about the POS. Just activate the training module so they can go through all the stages of placing orders and accepting payments, without affecting your financials. Once staff members get the hang of it, you can just remove the “Training mode” label and allow them access to perform their duties;

• You can assign different responsibilities: you can set up different access for each employee, such as only allowing senior members to use the cash drawer;

• There is fast login: using RFID card so employees don’t waste time trying to remember usernames and passwords;

• You can monitor each action: you can look over each employee’s transaction, from placed orders and payments to refunds.

If you want to know how to train waiters in restaurant, one of your main goals should be teaching them how to upsell and cross-sell without creating an uncomfortable experience for clients.

You can make the training more efficient with role-playing. Have someone pretend to be the client and encourage the employees to persuade the pretense customer to spend more.

Check out these tips you can share with your employees during the upselling training:

• Strike a natural conversation with the client: while seating them so you can find more about their food preferences and make better recommendations;
• Get familiar with food-drink pairings: you can have an illustration in the staff quarters that shows which dish goes with each food so employees will suggest complementary alcoholic or non-alcoholic drinks;
• Remind clients about promotions: if you have any offers available, have employees ask clients if they would like to take advantage of them. It will also help to have promotions at the top of the menu where they are hard to miss.

You can add a variety of tried and tested restaurant promotions in a couple of seconds with the Promotions module from GloriaFood. Try out free delivery, 2+1 offer, free item for orders over $60 and many other deals that attract new customers and increase average order value.

One of the main topics of your restaurant employee training checklist should be serving etiquette, describing how to treat a client from the moment they walk in the restaurant until they leave.

You can have a presentation showcasing tips on how to properly serve customers, from ensuring to visit their table to ask if they need something else, to answering food-related questions and handling complaints.

Afterward, you can follow it with an interactive session where you role-play and allow employees to come up with their own ideas to make guests feel more comfortable.

Safety and hygiene should make it to the top of both front of house training and the kitchen training checklist as both directly interact with the food. You must make it clear how important it is to always follow all health and safety procedures.

You can do so by highlighting the consequences of not doing so, like:

• A client getting gravely sick;
• The restaurant getting fines and loosing its reputation, making it hard to pay their salaries;
• The restaurant is closed by authorities which means they won’t have a job anymore.

Working in the restaurant industry isn’t just about preparing and serving food, but also working in a team. All members must collaborate well for the business to function, no matter their position.

Therefore, you could organize some games and exercises that help employees get to know each other better, what their position entails and what good collaboration looks like.

You should also make the chain-of-command clear so employees know who they can turn to when they need help, especially during situation that needs to be solved as soon as possible.

This is a usually overlooked part of the restaurant employee training checklist because it doesn’t involve daily tasks. Maintenance for equipment, storage and other parts of the restaurant is usually done weekly, monthly, and even quarterly.

Nevertheless, these tasks should be mentioned during trained and assigned to specific individuals to ensure they are performed on time.

You now have the topics you must include in your restaurant employee training checklist. The next step is to settle on the way you will deliver the training. There are a variety of options, and you can mix and match them according to budget and available time:

• Reading materials + Q&A session: this method is ideal for policies and procedures that take quite some time to read and process. The Q&A session at the end allows them to ask about any topic that was not clear so they can better understand the material;
• Classroom instruction: ideal for teaching employees about health and safety, upselling, closing procedures and much more. It works best when it is couple with real-life examples and even exercises. For example, a trainer showing how to safely put food away at the end of the day and then having an employee pretend to do the same;
• Video & online courses: while it is a more impersonal take on how to train restaurant staff, it can be an easy way to each employees about food and safety in an illustrative way that catches their attention;
• Tasting sessions: this is best fitted for getting servers acquainted with the menu. Just having them read over the menu and try to memorize it won’t always deliver the best results. Instead, organize a tasting session, where the chef presents the dishes to the staff and describes what makes them special. This way, employees are guaranteed to remember the taste and will be more knowledgeable when recommending dishes to customers;
• Shadow training: ideal for new employees with little to no experience. Have them shadow a more experienced team members for a few days to learn the steps until they feel confident they can do it on their own.

Help your staff members be the best at their jobs with a comprehensive restaurant employee training checklist that touches upon all the main key areas of a food business.

Don’t hesitate to rely on technology to make both your job and your employees’ easier, like the staff management feature from the GloriaFood POS system.