Restaurant profitability is a constant topic for managers, and for good reason, with average profit margins falling between 3-5%. A streamlined training program can help boost efficiency while shrinking ancillary costs. Modern learning is mobile, teaching your employees on the kitchen line, prep station, or serving floor. They shouldn’t be stuffed in a back office, leafing through a paper manual. For multi-location restaurants, the days of paper training materials have gone the way of paper order slips. Look for these mobile learning tools in your eLearning system that will help strengthen profits and cut your paper costs:
First, and this should go without saying, your eLearning software needs to be mobile-ready. This means the user interface should adapt to smartphone and tablet screen sizes and not be a pinch-and-zoom affair. Restaurant employees are always moving, often with only one free hand, so your mobile tools need to be easy to navigate.
The most important software tool in your eLearning arsenal is video. Your Gen-Z and post-millennial employees already live in the Snapchat/Instagram/Facebook Live world, so they will respond best to watching short video lessons (sometimes called “microlearning”), ranging from 15 seconds to 3 minutes. Delivering this performance support to your employees at the right moment when they need it on the line or floor keeps the work flowing and cuts down on service interruptions, which are bad for business. Watching a brief video to review proper plating or food safety happens quickly - can you imagine the interruption and disruption if your staff was expected to look up the answer in a paper manual?
Another great tool for your restaurant is a digital checklist. Yes, this saves paper, but simple checklists are an easy way to mitigate risk, from hygiene to food safety, inventory, and loss prevention. Decreased risk saves money in many ways, and that reduction can be applied directly to your bottom line. Tracking checklist items in a database makes for easy access and tracking of issues instead of having to leaf back through file folders of old lists.
Automatic syncing of documents not only cuts down on printing new revisions of paperwork, manuals, recipes but it also eliminates the need for a manager to take time out of their day to receive the documents, replace the corresponding paper in the manual, and notify the staff that there’s new documentation. When you cultivate a learning organization, employees will get in the habit of checking for new communication every day, and communicating new procedures or documents to their co-workers.
These learning tools are a huge advantage for your restaurant, putting the means for saving under your control. When you add in the benefits of cutting back on paper use, you can see that it’s good for the environment, and also good for saving time and money for your restaurant.