8 Steps to a World-class Onboarding System
📌 Finding the perfect new waiter is just a first step. What’s next?This is where true fun begins!What follows is an onboarding process that will get your restaurant through turnovers successfully and help you apply just the right tactics that lead to productivity, team motivation, and employee retention.
Step 1. Immerse a new employee in your restaurant’s culture
No matter how good you’re for a job, it’s always hard to be a newcomer. Make sure your employee feels welcomed and aware of your team’s goals and culture as soon as they walk in. Be open and honest; there is nothing worse than not meeting the expectations of new hires.
Step 2. Consider the trainee’s wants and needs
Managers often design their training programs focusing only on delivering all the information at once without paying attention to the employee’s preferences and needs. Today, restaurants are meant to design programs that match the interests, habits and behavior of employees in the workplace. Put the proper efforts into creating adaptation practices that are effective for each and every employee!
Step 3. Use Mr. Tomato
Mr. Tomato is a staff management platform designed specifically to make the onboarding process easy and automatic for restaurants. By downloading the app and customizing them with your restaurant’s information, you can allow your employees to practically train themselves through their smartphones! Your menu, your policies, cleaning protocols, seasonal offers, special dishes— everything packed into a shared ecosystem that bonds everyone on your team instantly, ensuring a better organization.
Step 4. Slow down!
Be careful not to overwhelm your new employees by pilling them with everything at once!
Memory isn’t perfect, and large amounts of information are hard for any brain to register properly.
That’s why Mr. Tomato’s micro-learning approach is so effective! With dynamic repetition in its practice screens, it aims to reduce your training time by 70% and ensure the new employee learns everything more efficiently.
Step 5. Show the trainee how everything works
Lots of new employees join the team and only receive information related to their specific responsibilities. Newbies with little to no work experience are left with only a small clue about what’s going on with the rest of the restaurant. But it’s very important for employees to collaborate and communicate with colleagues involved in various restaurant processes. This helps to bring the team together, increase the level of staff’s commitment with their work, and their capacity to innovate and adapt to new challenges faster.
Step 6. Involve them in your vision
If you hire someone, it means that they will become an important part of your strategic plan. Whether the new employee is a member of the cleaning team or the senior manager, everyone has a role to play in bringing the restaurant’s strategy to life.
So how are your people supposed to move towards the goal of the restaurant if they don’t even know what the goal is? It’s vital for a business’ success that employees understand your purpose and strategy for them to feel engaged and valued.
Step 7. Discipline your managers
People don’t leave companies, they leave managers. So you better make sure that the person in charge of your team is properly trained to be a good leader from the very beginning.
They must participate actively in a new employee’s onboarding, even with the help of a platform or not. They should make the newbies feel welcome and prepared in order to develop the team’s effectiveness.
Step 8. Offer development opportunities
They must participate actively in a new employee’s onboarding, even with the help of a platform or not. They should make the newbies feel welcome and prepared in order to develop the team’s effectiveness.
