This is bad staff training

Staff training is in Beth Hussey's bones. She started figuring it out at her family's restaurant in the 80s, and it became a professional focus as she moved up the service industry ladder from busser (where her brother stuck her when she first started) to owner. All in all she's opened 17 full service restaurants in her career and has trained up the staff at each of them. She's also started Shifty, a business that helps bars and restaurants do staff training right.

This week we went over what most—we're talking at least 90%—of bars and restaurants get wrong when training their staff.

Here's the typical staff training process Beth sees bars and restaurants using:

• Step 1: A person is hired and told to report for their training shift.
• Step 2: The manager, who may have forgotten the new person was even coming, puts them with the best server/bartender who's on that night.
• [Interlude step]: That experienced server wonders what the hell they did to deserve having a shadower all night long.
• Step 3: The new person follows the server around all shift with no training materials or guidance.
• Step 4: Repeat step 3 as needed, maybe 2-3 more times.
• Step 5 (hard maybe): New staff are given a bunch of training materials to look at that are either useless or out-of-date

A lot of times that's it. After the third training night the person is just out on the floor. This was certainly the process at the bars and restaurants I've worked at.

In Beth's eyes there are a bunch of reasons this doesn't work, and they kind of fit into 4 categories:

1. It's not enough. After just a couple shadowing shifts there's no way that new server or bartender will know enough to give guests a great experience. They need more time and better materials to be truly service ready.
2. Related, but worth noting in its own point: there's very little focus on the menus in this training approach. Your people need to know the menu inside and out, and sending servers and bartenders out there without a deep knowledge of the menu is bad for everyone involved—your guests, you, and the new staff member. "Can I get that gluten free?" "Is the beef grass fed?" These are questions your customers will have, and it's not a good look when staff has to say "I dunno."
3. There's no consistency, and it continues a cycle of bad training. The new person just sees one subjective approach from one person who learned their subjective approach from another person's subjective approach, and so on. When there's no consistency, new servers and bartenders are unsure, which, again, isn't good for anyone involved. When in a new situation, everyone thrives with structure and specific instruction.
4. After the "formal" training period (if we can call it that), there's never any more training. Once you're trained, you're considered done. There's no ongoing training, no expectation that your servers need to stay on point, no formalized way to introduce changes or updates. This is short sighted and isn't realistic to the needs of the restaurant.

Check out the interview for more about Beth's history, an awesome anecdote about how her current restaurant, Hazel's, found its groove after almost failing, and more on why most staff training approaches can be so harmful:

Why?

Because it helps customers order faster, which can mean better beer sales for you and a better experience for them.

Beer drinkers generally know what kind of beer they want when they walk through the door.

For example, summertime me is looking for something hoppy. There's no world where I'll get a sour, stout, or amber. But, of course, some folks avoid IPAs at all costs.

If I see a section called "Hoppy" on the menu, I go there straightaway: "awesome, no need to scan the whole menu." For those IPA haters, if they see that "Hoppy" section, they can just skip on by: "ok, great, I'll just go find the section I'm looking for."

In each case, sorting the beer by style makes it easier for customers to find the beer they want. And that's a great thing for them and for your beer sales.

How?

You can do this manually. How you'd implement it depends on what works for your team, but it could look like this:

• Create an editable menu doc in Google Docs, Word, Powerpoint, or whatever and give everyone who needs it editing access.
• Make the beer style menu sections you need: Hoppy, Crisp & Bright, Toasted & Nutty, Dark & Roasted, Fruity & Spicy, Tart & Funky.
• Copy and paste your beer (and the beer info!) into the relevant category.
• Anytime your beer selection changes, delete the beer that's gone, then add new beers to the relevant category.

It certainly takes some time, but doing this would definitely be worth it.

• Eurostar craft beer. Eurostar is the high speed train line that gets you from London to Paris, the Netherlands, and Belgium. They recently partnered with London's Two Tribes Brewing to create a hazy IPA that's exclusive to the train line. Cool move.
• AB InBev down overall, but up in US for first time in years. AB InBev's stock slid after an unexpected drop in quarterly volume. But it wasn't all bad news: US volume actually went up for the first time since the Dylan Mulvaney controversy last year.
• Soccer team not enough, Mac and Reynolds buy Wrexham brewery. We all know Hollywood's Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds bought a soccer team in Wales a few years ago. They made a TV show about it. Now they've bought a brewery in the same city. They're going all in on Wrexham. Maybe this'll make it into the TV show, too.