Using e-learning and your learning management system can increase standards in the food service industry – as explored by Tanya Galton

Customer experience is the biggest selling point today: 7 out of 10 people, according to American Express, prefer to be clients of a company that delivers overall great service. There’s a lot that contributes to a customer experience of visiting a restaurant: It’s excellent menu and location, ambience and vistas, loyalty programs and cleanliness, quality of being waited on and much, much more. 

Training your staff to deliver service that meets your own quality standards is vital

However, your tables in a stunning location with great views, innovative menu, and reasonable prices can remain empty if your staff cannot advise on the menu, doesn’t know how to treat a customer with special needs or can’t offer a loyalty program or an off-the-menu item when the situation calls for it. 

The contribution your staff is immense, from kitchen workers, to hosts and waiters, to the overall customer experience and can be a deal breaker for your patrons. This means that training your staff to deliver service that meets your own quality standards is vital.

It is also a huge challenge. According to the State of Restaurants 2024 report, average employee turnover at full service restaurants is 28%. This is on top of the cost of training a new staff member at $3,646. 

As you can see, many owners arrive at the problem of training their staff according to increasing quality standards, but on a budget. In this article, we discuss the steps you can take to tackle this challenge using a Learning Management System (LMS).

Step 1: Assess the needs 

This is the easiest part, as the skill gaps in food services are immediately visible. You can start by outlining a skill set that you see in an ideal and/or acceptable employee. This can be matched against particular people in your organisation or against how this skill set is represented on average in your organisation.

Your next step would be to break it down into particular skills and knowledge, such as:

• Company values and mission
• Customer care skills
• Menu knowledge
• Handling difficult customers and situations
• General psychological knowledge
• Season-related menu changes and specials, etc.  

Pay special attention to the fact that food services is an industry with a well-developed professional lingo, and newcomers may not be familiar with it. More often than not, it deserves a dedicated course. 

Step 2: Consider the specifics of your target audience

In food service and catering, it’s not about finding skill gaps. It’s even more about understanding very well who your trainees are. The demographics of line personnel in cafes and restaurants is very diverse in terms of race and gender. The National Restaurant Association highlights that approximately 40% are below 25 years of age and some 10% are below 18. These numbers are even higher for waitstaff. 

This means that it’s often younger people that need training, a generation which is often characterised by clip thinking, shorter attention spans, and assertiveness. They are digital natives who are pragmatic, value direct communication, authenticity and relevance. Their very understanding of quality standards can be different from yours or other people involved in the design, development and deployment of a learning intervention. This has to be reflected in what gets delivered. 

Step 3: Develop your training content

The technicalities of creating a set of courses on your LMS will be individual to you. The focus of this key step needs to be performed regardless of a technology stack and with several considerations in mind:

Compete for your trainees attention

Your trainees are likely to have a massive amount of distracting factors, all concentrated around their phone. Social media, chats, and notifications from a variety of apps. They are used to quick switches between all of those, attention spans can be short.

Your content needs to be concise and allow them to study in short iterations. Learning nuggets are perfect for this audience and many LMS platforms handle this challenge by employing a variety of animated and interactive elements, offering a huge content library that allows you to make courses visually pleasing for any audience.

Prioritise approachability

It’s a must to make your learning available on a mobile device, and be refined in your thinking. There has to be a minimum of clicks between a notification and the start of a learning block.

At the same time, you need to steer clear of crossing the line into being obnoxious. You may remember the numerous memes made about ‘abusive Duolingo Owl’. 

In the hotel, restaurant, and café/catering (HoReCa) industry, there can be very busy times you need to accommodate for, as well as slower times you can take advantage of.

Prioritise interactivity

You won’t hold your audience’s attention successfully if your content is not engaging and if they cannot interact with it in ways that count.

Use gamification techniques, interactive elements, short interim quizzes and perhaps a course authoring tool that allows you to introduce an interactive virtual helper character for courses and quizzes. 

Do not overload

When you align your training with your business, make sure that each course is made with a single business objective in mind. Break them down in shorter, more manageable courses.

For instance:

• A course on Specials Menu
• A course on working with reclamations and returns
• A course on handling kids and kids menu
• A safety course for working with hot substances

These have the perk of following the dopamine law: each checkpoint and achievement, no matter how small, gives the recipient a dopamine dose. Your audience is used to short-term dopamine processing. 

Be practical

When creating content, focus on its practical application rather than theory. Instead of waxing poetic about how important warning about the presence of allergens in your dishes is, give your employees exact scripts. 

Step 4: Assess the results

Your assessment procedures should take into account your trainees’ specifics. In our experience working with food catering and service customers, attaching course completion to KPIs doesn’t work. Employees start cheating more often than not: passing quizzes for one another, clocking in fake study times and inventing other ways to earn KPIs without actually learning. 

It could be more effective if you involve line managers with a dashboard where managers can observe and analyse the progress of their team.

Another way to counteract the cheating is personalized quizzes. In some platforms it’s possible to make each quiz variant unique because each is generated from a large pool of questions, so no sequence of questions is the same and employees can’t simply share it.

Step 5: Fine-tune and scale

Using an LMS for training allows you to create your learning base once and then scale it at literally zero expense. The cost of maintenance and fine-tuning of such courses is quite negligible compared to the cost of running your training the traditional way each time. 

Once you have completed the base body of your learning materials, you can use it like Lego; add and expand on it, customise it for specific groups of employees or for a specific restaurant in your chain. For instance, if you open a location in a place with higher security requirements, like an airport, or a very local flavour, like running a chain restaurant in an amusement park or a historical area. 

You can also start fine-tuning your learning delivery after you gather the initial feedback. We had a customer who had very strict sanitary rules imposed in their chain. Their employees weren’t even allowed to use their phones inside the kitchen. For this customer, we helped to install our app and run courses on the terminal where orders were entered. The personnel could use it during slower hours. 

Quality learning, quality service

Today, industry standards in hospitality and food service industries are higher than ever. To uphold them, you have to streamline your staff training, make it more intensive and flexible as never before. But you also need to keep in mind the specifics of people working in HoReCa and to learn to deliver learning materials that they will find helpful and actually use. 

Using a world class LMS helps you to achieve the ambitious goal of creating learning materials that both meet the quality standards of your company and match the values and learning habits of your employees. 

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Tanya Galton is Director of iSpring Academy