Is your staff training bad?

Staff training is in Beth Hussey's bones. She started figuring it out at her family's restaurant in the 80s, and it became a professional focus as she moved up the service industry ladder from busser (where her brother stuck her when she first started) to owner. All in all she's opened 17 full service restaurants in her career and has trained up the staff at each of them. She's also started Shifty, a business that helps bars and restaurants do staff training right.

This week we went over what most—we're talking at least 90%—of bars and restaurants get wrong when training their staff.

Here's the typical staff training process Beth sees bars and restaurants using:

• Step 1: A person is hired and told to report for their training shift.
• Step 2: The manager, who may have forgotten the new person was even coming, puts them with the best server/bartender who's on that night.
• [Interlude step]: That experienced server wonders what the hell they did to deserve having a shadower all night long.
• Step 3: The new person follows the server around all shift with no training materials or guidance.
• Step 4: Repeat step 3 as needed, maybe 2-3 more times.
• Step 5 (hard maybe): New staff are given a bunch of training materials to look at that are either useless or out-of-date

A lot of times that's it. After the third training night the person is just out on the floor. This was certainly the process at the bars and restaurants I've worked at.

In Beth's eyes there are a bunch of reasons this doesn't work, and they kind of fit into 4 categories:

1. It's not enough. After just a couple shadowing shifts there's no way that new server or bartender will know enough to give guests a great experience. They need more time and better materials to be truly service ready.
2. Related, but worth noting in its own point: there's very little focus on the menus in this training approach. Your people need to know the menu inside and out, and sending servers and bartenders out there without a deep knowledge of the menu is bad for everyone involved—your guests, you, and the new staff member. "Can I get that gluten free?" "Is the beef grass fed?" These are questions your customers will have, and it's not a good look when staff has to say "I dunno."
3. There's no consistency, and it continues a cycle of bad training. The new person just sees one subjective approach from one person who learned their subjective approach from another person's subjective approach, and so on. When there's no consistency, new servers and bartenders are unsure, which, again, isn't good for anyone involved. When in a new situation, everyone thrives with structure and specific instruction.
4. After the "formal" training period (if we can call it that), there's never any more training. Once you're trained, you're considered done. There's no ongoing training, no expectation that your servers need to stay on point, no formalized way to introduce changes or updates. This is short sighted and isn't realistic to the needs of the restaurant.

Check out the interview for more about Beth's history, an awesome anecdote about how her current restaurant, Hazel's, found its groove after almost failing, and more on why most staff training approaches can be so harmful:

Why worry about menu design?

Imagine this: you've done the significant work to have an always-up-to-date beer menu. Every single time a keg kicks or a new can arrives you update the menu accordingly. And that happens multiple times a month/week.

But you're not seeing an uptick in beer sales. Why? The up-to-date menu should be helping. You're starting to wonder if maybe it's not worth maintaining the menu.

If this is the case, your issue might be with the design of your menu rather than the content. A poorly designed beer menu can flatline your beer sales. But a well-designed menu can:

• Make your customers want to spend time with your menu.
• Help customers figure out what to order more easily.
• This puts customers at ease: coming back to the menu to order another beer isn't a daunting task. It's a pleasant one.

How can I get a well-designed beer menu?

You could do it manually. How you'd implement it depends on what works for your budget/team, but it could look like this:

• Locate a graphic designer, ideally one who has experience with menu-making.
• Work with them to create a well-designed editable menu template. Make sure they understand the use case—you'll be editing this often, so it can't be a fragile design that breaks if a beer name is too long, etc. It also needs to be editable in an approachable software program, not a difficult-to-use design program.
• Train all necessary members of your team (managers, bartenders, etc.) on how to edit the menu template file. Make sure they practice so they know where to locate it, how to edit it, etc. You don't want them to be handcuffed on a Friday afternoon.
• Anytime your beer selection changes, you/a team member visits the file to delete the beer(s) that's gone and add the new beer(s).

It certainly takes some effort to track down a talented graphic designer and to train your team, but doing it manually like this could be worth it if that's your only option.

• Tariff yo-yoing continues. A week after implementing what he and his administration called "universal reciprocal tariffs" on every country in the world (as well as some uninhabited islands), Trump pulled back and hit pause for 90 days. So it looks like we're back to waiting to see what tariff world we're going to be living in. A question for you import-heavy bars and restaurants: where are you at right now? Still have your usual supply, or are you starting to have to substitute?
• Modelo, already struggling w/ tariffs, also sees trouble stemming from immigration policy changes. According to Constellation Brands CEO, Hispanic folks are being much more conservative with their spending as they worry about possible job losses, either to recession or immigration-related issues. Constellation and its #1 selling Modelo Especial still sit at the top of the beer market because of its wider growth over the last few years, but it's been taking a lot of punches since January.
• Miller releases Dive Bar Sounds vinyl. Another entry in their Dive Bar product series (they've previously done a candle and other items), the record has 7 tracks and is infused with actual High Life. Gimmicky, but I love it.