Multi-generational restaurant workforces require varying instruction, with more movement toward emphasizing the “why” of training, according to operators at the recent 16th annual Nation’s Restaurant News Food Safety Symposium.
Fast-casual Noodles & Company, for example has four generations of workers in its restaurants, said Steve Calamaris, director of food safety and quality assurance at the Broomfield Colo.-based brand, with half or more of those under the age of 18. Younger workers at the 460-unit brand prefer short 30-second videos for instruction, while older employees might learn best with written cards, he said.
“We’re just really trying to incorporate those different learning methods into our training materials for the different groups,” Calamaris said during a “Workforce and Food Safety Best Practices: Preparing for New Employees and Employee Retention” panel at the Ecolab-sponsored symposium.
Calamaris shared insights with fellow panelists, including Jason Evans, dean of the college of food innovation and technology at Johnson & Wales in Providence, R.I.; Casey Jacobson, safety manager at Prairie du Sac, Wisc.-based Culver Franchising System; and Christina Serino, senior director of quality assurance and food safety at Scottsdale, Ariz.-based P.F. Chang’s China Bistro Inc. The panel was moderated by Alan Liddle, contributing editor for Nation’s Restaurant News.
Serino, who in September was named 2022 Outstanding Leader in Food Safety during the National Restaurant Association’s Food Safety and Quality Assurance Expert Exchange, said of younger workers: “We have to engage with them differently than previous generations. Training has to be attention-grabbing, quick [and] memorable. We’re trying similar videos, a lot of visually exciting material —very photo-focused — instead of just having them read paragraphs word for word.”
Jacobson said Culver’s, which has nearly 900 locations and is 99% franchised, is approaching food safety training similarly. “For a lot of people,” he said, “this is their first job or their first time working in a restaurant.”
Evans, in a preceding presentation on “The Future Workforce,” had said communicating the “why” was important in training of Gen Z, or those born from 1997 to 2012.
Jacobson echoed that advice. “Providing for the ‘why’ is so much more important now than it was in the past,” he said, adding that the training had to be available on different platforms.
Accessibility of training materials is also crucial, the panelists said.
“We are really focus on making everything accessible,” Serino said. “So we've got all the materials on their iPads. We've got them on their office-station system. … so just really focusing on getting the information to them in multiple avenues and making it easier for those restaurant leaders to retrain or follow up.”
Food safety needs to be incorporated into all levels of training, they said, especially during onboarding of new employees.
“We’re going to try to insert a little bit of food safety in everything,” she said. “It’s not just one big section on food safety and sanitation. In every recipe, it'll start with ‘wash your hands.’ … We are working on making some videos for food safety for onboarding and for ongoing training.”
The current situation with labor shortages at restaurants poses hurdles for onboarding instruction, Calamaris of Noodles & Company acknowledged, but managers have to keep it as a priority.
Retention of trained employees is also important, the panelists noted.
“One of the things we're really trying to focus on is the path forward,” Serino said. “What is their career path? We want them to know that they have one. We’ve got a lot of people in our corporate office that started in the restaurants as bussers or servers and have worked their way up over time. We do really try to emphasize that.”
While many food safety training courses are created with third parties, the panelists said, advantages exist for staff members to craft training materials — with oversight — for the teams.
Evans of Johnson & Wales noted that videos created by staff members can be a learning experience in themselves.
“The quickest way to learn something is to have to teach it,” Evans suggested. “So you might invest with your team members to create fun content that then get shared with the entire organization.”
Younger employees, especially those college-aged and younger, are being bombarded with information, Evans said.
“We’ve overloaded them with information on top of what they're looking at on their own,” he noted. “Every single day they're getting e-mail communication, Tweets and the video thing, TikTok.
“They’re desensitized to communication,” he said. “I think that's something relevant to a management perspective. They are desensitized to information so we have to get more and more creative and more and more selective about what we're communicating to the people on our teams, the people who are working with us.”
Serino said P.F. Chang’s has brainstormed different competitions for sharing best practices.
“If you've got something that really works in your restaurant where you're continually getting a really great score,” she said, “can you share that with us and your market?”
For franchised organizations like Culver’s, Jacobson said the franchise agreement should include food-safety standards.
“Within our in-house training all the managers go through a pretty extensive training process,” he said. “They need to understand every role within the restaurant in order to make it to a manager level, and they go through a certification process for their skills.” Part of that is also a train-the-trainer philosophy, Jacobson said, so to get the next level, they need to train that position to another manager.
Evans said young workers will challenge the system if managers do not lay out processes, priorities and expectations clearly with a well-defined and a well-justified structure.
In food education, he added, that will change how courses are taught. “If they see a process and don't understand why we do it that way,” Evans noted, “they will challenge you. They'll challenge the system on why we do this this way. I think that’s a really, really healthy exercise in food education.”
Jacobson said Culver’s was focused on “really providing the ‘why’ behind everything we're doing. Because if people aren't understanding that, they are simply just not going to have the buy-in. I think that's the most important piece.”
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