Employee training
If you turn the clocks ahead to mid-season, without too much trouble you can probably visualize yourself overseeing a lack of efficiency, a disregard for customers and some unsafe performance on the part of some or all of your food service personnel. “Where did they go wrong; how did these nice people hired in the fall turn into such degenerates?” you say to yourself. Chances are those nice people are acting exactly as you would if you were in their shoes. Employees need to know what is expected of them and how they are supposed to behave.
There are some general areas of training and information promulgation which should be required for all food service operations. These are: 1) employee rules and regulations 2) food service organization 3) customer orientation 4) sanitation and safety and 5) employee benefits. A handbook is sometimes helpful, but every point relative to shift schedules, uniforms, absences, pay days etc. should be brought up and discussed at a general employees’ meeting. Likewise a discussion of the organization chart and some description of the functional flow of the food service operation should be presented.
Perhaps the most important but least emphasized subject is customer service. Too many employees see their jobs as simply “cooking hot dogs,” “passing out cokes,” “making change”; not enough of them understand that they are supposed to be serving customers. A real rap session with no effort spared to get this point across is essential. A meaningful lecture on safety and sanitation is necessary to update and introduce employees to the inherent dangers of food production and service. Finally, a general meeting on the benefits of the job is usually a good tool for reenforcing the fact that such benefits are part of the pay; they are earned in consideration for services performed and not merely handed out as part of the dole.
In addition to the general employee meetings, specific training sessions should be held for small components of the organization chart. For example, cashiers, grill and fry cooks, pantry personnel, counter servers and busboys should have separate meetings with a comprehensive run-through of their job descriptions, a demonstration of how they are to perform their tasks and a practice session allowing them to perform and demonstrate their ability. Anything less than this will usually result in: cashiers who fumble over prices, stall at computing sales tax, operate without a system for taking payment and making change; fry and grill cooks who produce too much when little is needed and not enough when much is needed, whose work stations are a mess and waste is high; pantry personnel who cut each cake or divide batch portions without any uniformity as to size or shape, who mostly seem to be moving but never producing; counter servers who organize their work flow to meet customer flow and usually start the day in a clean, organized work station and end up the day knee-deep in debris; and busboys who make five trips to clean a table and still forget to wash it down, who don’t realize their job also includes picking up trash from the floor as well as cleaning tables. Simply put, if you want crack troops, you have to train them.
Training has to be organized and planned to meet the span of attention of the group. It’s usually more effective to have a series of short meetings strung out over several days, but much more economical to set aside one or two days and schedule a mix of lecture, demonstrations and practice sessions.
Employee rules and regulations as well as employee benefits are best covered by the person at the top. For a moderate sized ski area, this usually means the area owner or chief operating officer. For a major development grossing more than $500,000 in food service, the food service director is best.
Specific training sessions should be the responsibility of the person in charge of that group of workers. Often, however, it is a good idea to let the head cashier, the head busboy, etc. lead these sessions. It lends them a little prestige, but most important it gets them involved.
An alternative is to bring in an expert for a particular subject. Cash register companies can often provide training specialists for your cashiers. Product companies will sometimes provide master bakers and chefs to train your personnel, the advantage here being that even your old timers will be learning something new.—R.D.M.
