Running a restaurant is all about perfecting the customer experience. You want your customers to love your food, enjoy the atmosphere and appreciate the service provided by your staff. As such, onboarding new employees and ensuring that standards are consistent across your front-of-house and kitchen teams is a significant step towards customer satisfaction, profit and success. But how can new employees be properly integrated into your restaurant business?

Make standards and expectations clear

Establishing expectations and setting standards early on when onboarding someone is an important step to take. It helps to ensure that they maintain the standards set by your established team and helps them to adjust more effectively to your workplace culture. Expectations could include how to interact with customers, how to deal with complaints or the quality of food being delivered from the kitchen. You should also provide work clothing or accessories to all staff and communicate expectations surrounding how and when this should be worn.

Let them experience the process end to end

An effective way to help new staff feel more involved with the business is to let them experience the operation from end to end. Let new front-of-house staff spend some time with your chefs to see how the food is made and what challenges they face, and vice versa. This can help to create a more unified cohort that can provide a better quality service to customers overall. It will also help staff to understand when or where other teams could benefit from support to ensure the restaurant runs a little smoother.

Educate them on industry laws and regulations

As with any business in the food and drinks industry, there are strict rules and regulations surrounding health and safety, hygiene and food standards. Provide all new staff with this information and ask them to review it carefully whilst they are in their training phase. Mistakes in food storage and preparation procedures could be damning to your business, and not knowing consumer rights can lead to bad publicity or reviews for your establishment – so ensure that all staff are trained properly.

Ask them to shadow experienced employees

Experienced members of your workforce should be setting a good example for new employees to learn from, so encourage any new starters to shadow your best team members. This will help to pass good habits on to new staff and ensure a more consistent attitude and level of service from everyone. Once they feel comfortable about what they should be doing, ease them into their own situations and roles gradually so they can build their confidence.