Sponsored by Bites
However, the challenges facing them are greater now more than ever. Think labor shortages, rising costs, and supply chain disruptions - just to name a few.
Now here’s the good news - training employees in a way that keeps them engaged and improves their skills is a lot easier than you might think and can help address the major challenges facing F&B businesses. Below, discover six ways to build a training strategy that resonates with modern staff while saving time and money.
1. Use microlearning to streamline onboarding
The labor shortage plaguing the food and beverage industry also has consequences for how to approach training. Many businesses have had to start from scratch and hire new teams, which also means onboarding all these new employees. At a time when finding enough staff is essential, retaining them while maintaining customer satisfaction is just as important.
The solution is microlearning. Providing new employees with bite-sized content that trains them on specific parts of the business decreases onboarding time by 67% without compromising on quality.
2. Take a digital approach to providing high-quality training to all employees
Going mobile with your training strategy helps maintain consistency in the quality of training across all employees over time. Making it easy for staff to access training materials on the go and in the palms of their hands can boost completion rates significantly - with Bites, for example, F&B businesses experience an 80%-90% completion rate for ongoing trainings. And as employees get to enjoy convenient, high-quality training, their managers benefit, too: there’s no need for them to be physically present at the branches to ensure seamless and consistent onboarding.
3. Engage Gen Z and millennial staff with content they’re used to
The younger generations are the ones in the workforce that F&B businesses need to appeal to these days. In fact, 75% of the US workforce in 2020 was Gen Z and millennials. Since this is likely going to be an F&B organization’s employee base, make sure to adapt training content in a way that resonates with them.
Videos and bite-sized content that’s reminiscent of social media and messaging are the types of content that they’ll absorb best, especially when you consider that Gen Z spends 23 hours per week streaming video content. Keep this in mind when designing a training strategy - use short videos that provide on-the-job training they’ll actually engage with.
4. Go app-less to improve accessibility
Modern employees are drowning in apps - on average, mobile users have over 80 apps on their devices. Don’t add to the confusion by forcing F&B staff to download an app.
Bites lets business owners and training managers deliver content in a frictionless way, without sign-ins or downloads so all employees can easily access the knowledge they need to excel at their roles. The technology integrates with the platforms most staff are already using, so their onboarding and training feels seamless and they’ll interact with it when they’re most willing to engage.
5. Obtain an agile tool for ongoing training and learning in the flow of work
A training strategy should grow with a business and provide employees with ongoing training. An LMS alone does not offer this capability because it simply delivers content at specified frequencies and in blocks.
Using an agile tool like Bites fills in the knowledge gaps left by corporate LMSes. Using it as a complement to an existing LMS lets F&B business and franchise owners tailor their training strategy to provide high-value, on-the-job training materials that they can update regularly. As a business evolves, the employees should, too - flexibility is key for a modern training strategy.
6. Design high-quality content in-house, affordably
Forget outsourcing training content to external suppliers or investing in expensive solutions to do it in-house. Bites avoids these extra costs without compromising on quality, letting owners and training managers produce effective and trackable video-based training units quickly and affordably.
Keep the six tips above in mind when building a training approach to design a process that’s efficient, effective, and affordable. A tool like Bites can help F&B owners and hiring managers accomplish this even more easily and quickly by letting them create sharable and customizable bite-sized content that reaches employees in the ways they engage with most. Try Bites today to discover the benefits of this powerful training tool.
