When (and how) to re-onboard your team

Being a QSR manager can be stressful. As industries evolve and your employees gain tenure, you might begin to realize that your team doesn’t have the skills they need. If you’ve identified a skills gap, it might be time to re-onboard or retrain your employees.

What does it mean to retrain or re-onboard your employees?

Retraining or re-onboarding is a way to get your team up to speed with the latest changes in your organization or industry. Unfortunately, employee orientation can be short or nonexistent for some employees. As employees work, they pick up on some things, but they may be learning inaccurate or incomplete information.

Retraining helps you understand where your employees are so you can give them the skills they need to be successful in your industry. Instead of letting your employees continue to fall behind, companies who retrain help their staff members grow by teaching them what they need to know to be successful.

When is it time to retrain your workers?

Re-onboarding your employees is an expensive task. How do you know when it’s time to retrain them?

Your employee has been with you for several years

If your employees have been with you for several years without regular training, you must take the time to keep your employees educated. Professional development is crucial, so your workers should take the time to keep up, even if they’ve been with your company for a while.

The best option with an employee who has tenure at your organization is to invest in yearly training. If employees get frequent training, they won’t need to rush to keep up every few years.

You are moving to a completely new system

If you are a franchisee, sometimes your organization has changes that you don’t have control over. If this has happened to your team, it’s time to retrain your team so they can learn the new systems/processes.

For example, several companies have been adding new self-service machines to restaurants in the last few years. These new machines have changed the way that customers interact with employees. Employees had to learn to operate these systems and teach them to customers while grappling with how automation might affect their work.

The industry has changed, and your employees need to keep up

Industry changes aren’t frequent, but they happen. You can have a restaurant come to your area or a new law enacted in your city. These small changes can have a ripple effect on your business and require your employees to get retrained.

An example of this has been COVID-19 restrictions that have changed restaurant operations. While many QSRs were deemed essential, they couldn’t have customers in the restaurant. This industry change impacted the way employees worked and served customers overnight.

How to re-onboard your staff members

Have you decided that your team can use some retraining, but you aren’t sure where to start? Here’s how to determine employee competency and make time for training as a QSR manager.

Take a look at what they already know

Before you decide to re-onboard your team, you need to understand what they already know.

What transformation are you trying to achieve with your employees? Do they need to learn new software? Do you want to make sure they are up-to-date with recent customer service techniques?

Try creating a quiz to test your employees on their current knowledge. Observe where employees pass or fail, then create a curriculum that meets your team members where they are.

Alternatively, you can observe your employees in your restaurant. How do they handle customer service, compliance, communication, etc.? Monitoring employees as they work is a better way to understand where workers are if they aren’t great at taking tests.

Create a curriculum that’s easy to digest between/during shifts

One of the first ways you can re-onboard your staff is by using an easily digestible curriculum.

Microlearning has become extremely popular for companies wanting to train their staff members.

Instead of creating an extensive curriculum, you can slowly re-onboard or retrain your staff with quick articles, short videos, audio and quizzes.

Microlearning takes more time, but it’s easy to fit in between and during shifts compared to traditional learning techniques. If you don’t have any significant retraining needs, you can use this technique. When using this technique, you give refreshers or minor updates to training.

Pay for extra time with your employees to train during their off-time

Most QSRs work in shifts. If you need to train your employees, you can offer overtime for employees to come in during their day off or time off to complete training with you.

For example, you could offer a morning training session for employees who work at night and vice versa for morning workers. For employees who are off the training day, you can pay them to come in during one of your training sessions.

The extra time approach can be a fantastic way to train all of your employees while giving their paychecks an extra boost that week.

Pay for specific classes at a local college

If you need employees with particular skills like management or accounting, you might decide to pay for a class or two at a local college. While this training isn’t QSR specific, it can significantly impact work. Employees who understand how to manage the store or balance books will make great leaders one day.

There are a few downsides to using college as a training mechanism, though:

You can’t control the curriculum.
The courses are typically spread out over several weeks or a semester, and you have to accommodate that.
College is generally expensive, even at a community college.

On the other hand, there is a precedent for wanting more education in your restaurant as higher-level positions typically require a high school diploma or higher.

Shut down your store for more profound training (if needed)

While it’s not ideal, sometimes shutting down your store for an extended day of training makes more sense. For example, Starbucks shut down all their company-owned stores in May 2018 for racial bias training.

It may be challenging for your organization to pay overtime or work on training in shifts. Closing the store for one day to do company-wide training makes sense if you’ve seen a large-scale need for retraining at your organization.

Test your employees for knowledge after training

After training your staff, you need to retest or reobserve your employees. Did they learn from the training? Is it impacting how they interact with your customers or their colleagues?

You can also send a survey to your employees after training is over. Did they enjoy the training? What did they learn from it?

This follow-up step is vital to ensure that the training you are running is sticking with employees.

Conclusion: Get ready to re-onboard your team

Are you excited to retrain your employees and prepare them for the future of QSRs? Re-onboarding employees isn’t tricky. You’ve just got to follow the necessary steps: