This is good staff training

Last week we focused on what bad staff training looks like. This week we're gonna talk about good staff training.

Our guide for this is Beth Hussey. She's opened 17 full service restaurants in her career and has trained the staff every time. Do the math and you realize she's trained thousands of people. Impressive stuff.

She took that experience and knowledge and created a staff training app called Shifty, the secrets of which she shared with us in an interview:

1. Give everyone 5 training shifts: 3 training/shadowing shifts where they follow around a server/bartender and 2 shifts where they're in the kitchen/learning the food (if applicable).
2. For each shift, provide a sheet of paper with very detailed rules and expectations: when should they get there, what to wear, what they'll be doing, and so on. Leave nothing up in the air.
3. Make a checklist of everything they should learn during each shift.
4. The shadowed person then takes that checklist and moves through it with the new server.
5. At the end of each shift, give the new server their instruction sheet for the next training shift plus a homework assignment: make flashcards about the things they learned during their first shift.
6. The flashcards come from a list you make, where you tell them exactly what to write on each side. Do 10-20 flashcards per shift, w/ a max of 5 words on any one side.
7. The flashcards should cover everything you need them to know to successfully operate on the floor: policies, culture-related stuff, technical menu info, etc.
8. Assign these flashcard-making homework assignments after each training shift.
9. At the end of training have a face-to-face meeting with the new employee where you quiz them on their flashcards. Do it just like you would in school: put the ones they got right in one pile and the ones they got wrong in another.
10. After running that exercise, you'll be able to ascertain if they're ready. If they are, great! If not, you know exactly where they're struggling—that pile of flashcards they got wrong—so you can continue training them with a focus on those items.

Creating a system like this from scratch is a lot of work, and that's why Beth created Shifty, an app-based bar and restaurant staff training platform that already has this process built out inside of it. You can customize to your bar/restaurant, but the heavy lifting is all done for you.

Check out the interview for more details about staff training and about the psychology behind Shifty:

If you're interested in Shifty for your business, head over to the the website or send Beth and email at beth@shiftyinc.com.

Why?

TV Menus:

• Are easy for guests to read
• Help guests order faster
• Make it so your bartenders don't have to answer the question "What's on tap?"
• Always look professional
• You can update from anywhere in seconds
• Aren't as expensive or difficult to setup as you might think (more on that below)

Put simply, TV Menus can save you/your team time and make it easy for customers to order.

How can I do it?

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

• Get a smart TV (i.e. one w/ an internet browser).
• Design a slideshow on Google Slides to serve as your menu. Make sure you tune the settings to rotate screens correctly, etc.
• Use your smart TV's browser to access the Google Slides file.
• Make sure all members of the team know how to edit the file.
• Anytime your beer selection changes, visit the file to delete the beer that's gone and add new beers.

It certainly takes some time and training, but doing it manually like this could be worth it if that's your only option.

• Molson Coors to close historic Leinenkugel's Brewery. The brewery, most known nationally for Summer Shandy, was a western Wisconsin institution, functioning for over 150 years. They closed it for the sake of consolidation adn savings—all Leinenkugel's products will now be made in the giant Miller facility in western Milwaukee. It's a bummer for me, an avowed Leinenkugel's fan and general nostalgist, but what do you expect to happen when a brewery is owned by a multinational corporation?
• Chicago mayor proposes alcohol tax increase.The proposal calls for a 34%+ increase. In a study, the Distilled Spirits Council of America found that the changes could cost hundreds of jobs and $25 million in retail sales.
• Dry NJ town votes to end alcohol ban. For 120 years Haddon Heights, near Philadelphia, didn't allow alcohol sales. But on Tuesday residents voted to end the ban by a 2-to-1 margin.
• Ketamine use up, alcohol down in Australia. This is according to an analysis of wastewater from Down Under. Other findings: cannabis was the most widely used illicit drug, with use in non-urban areas more than twice as high as urban areas. This discrepancy makes sense to me—I'm def willing to believe taking an edible and watching the kangaroos hop around in the outback is a great time.