Posts in category: On-boarding

Employee onboarding is certainly not our favorite thing to do, and rarely something we prioritize. The truth is, most restaurant owners and managers are tired of it— exhausted, even! Employees seem to come and go as fast as clients these days, making turnovers a habit and fast onboarding a necessity.

Nevertheless, the desperation for a quick onboarding process could be truly detrimental for your staff’s satisfaction and, therefore, your restaurant’s customer service. According to a study by Zippia, 21% of employees quit after 6 months because of ineffective onboarding, saying they lacked clear guidelines and proper supervision. Here are the 5 most common onboarding mistakes you should avoid at all costs within your restaurant’s management:

• #1 Incomplete staff training

The hospitality industry is famous for their express training trials. New hires for waiting, hosting, and bartending jobs sometimes receive trainings from their managers that barely last for 30 minutes.

Staff training shouldn’t be a one-time show & tell. Employees should be granted with all the information necessary for them to complete their job, allowing them to examine everything accordingly, practice their new procedures, memorize menus, and completely understand their functions, schedules, and goals.

Surely, this is a lot for many restaurants, specially if they lack the time and resources to implement it properly. Luckily, there are affordable training methods that allow restaurants to minimize their training efforts. Mr. Tomato, for example, offers digital training modules with AI-customized learning paths for your employees to access from their phones for a fair price.

• #2 Loading them with all the information at once

Learning is progressive and shouldn’t be overwhelming. Pouring piles of information into a new employee is hardly ever effective. Honestly, we can almost guarantee they won’t remember a thing! Make sure you have a properly structured learning path for your employees to go through gradually as they integrate themselves into the workplace.

Mr. Tomato’s lessons and practices are a perfect technique for this, with customizable templates and a standardized flow, it creates interactive and gamified questions from your uploaded documents, a style that ensures engagement and memory retention.

• #3 Putting new hires to work immediately

We understand you want your new employee to fill in a vacant position immediately, but that can bring you way more problems than solutions. A restaurant’s reputation depends on the quality of its service, so it’s highly important that all your active employees are qualified to serve.

You must do constant evaluations before deciding when your new hire is ready to work. The best way to do this is testing them on their knowledge with exams. Mr. Tomato offers a testing software that creates random questions based on the uploaded materials, allowing you to set a date, measure the durations, and analyze the final results.

• #4 Not sharing vital information about the company

It’s vital that your entire team knows your restaurant’s mission, vision, values, and policies. Make sure you define your company properly for you to share it with each and every employee right from the start.

You don’t have to make a whole fuzz about it, though! No paper manuals, bulletin boards, or Power Point presentations necessary. You can always upload it on the Mr. Tomato app for your whole staff to access anytime, with the option to test them on it whenever you want.

• #5 Not establishing a clear hierarchy

Many new employees spend days in a job without knowing who their superior is. Everyone in your team must understand your company’s structure: everyone’s roles, the different departments, and who is in charge of each of them.

With an app like Mr. Tomato, you don’t even have to waste your time explaining this in person. The platform allows you to register every employee with a profile that specifies their position, their duties, their team, and their superior. Everyone can view this list anytime, as well as connect with each other, ask questions, and create fulfilling work relationships.

📌 Finding the perfect new waiter is just a first step. What’s next?
This is where true fun begins!
What follows is an onboarding process that will get your restaurant through turnovers successfully and help you apply just the right tactics that lead to productivity, team motivation, and employee retention.

Step 1. Immerse a new employee in your restaurant’s culture

No matter how good you’re for a job, it’s always hard to be a newcomer. Make sure your employee feels welcomed and aware of your team’s goals and culture as soon as they walk in. Be open and honest; there is nothing worse than not meeting the expectations of new hires.

Step 2. Consider the trainee’s wants and needs

Managers often design their training programs focusing only on delivering all the information at once without paying attention to the employee’s preferences and needs. Today, restaurants are meant to design programs that match the interests, habits and behavior of employees in the workplace. Put the proper efforts into creating adaptation practices that are effective for each and every employee!

Step 3. Use Mr. Tomato

Mr. Tomato is a staff management platform designed specifically to make the onboarding process easy and automatic for restaurants. By downloading the app and customizing them with your restaurant’s information, you can allow your employees to practically train themselves through their smartphones! Your menu, your policies, cleaning protocols, seasonal offers, special dishes— everything packed into a shared ecosystem that bonds everyone on your team instantly, ensuring a better organization.

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Step 4. Slow down!

Be careful not to overwhelm your new employees by pilling them with everything at once!

Memory isn’t perfect, and large amounts of information are hard for any brain to register properly.

That’s why Mr. Tomato’s micro-learning approach is so effective! With dynamic repetition in its practice screens, it aims to reduce your training time by 70% and ensure the new employee learns everything more efficiently.

Step 5. Show the trainee how everything works

Lots of new employees join the team and only receive information related to their specific responsibilities. Newbies with little to no work experience are left with only a small clue about what’s going on with the rest of the restaurant. But it’s very important for employees to collaborate and communicate with colleagues involved in various restaurant processes. This helps to bring the team together, increase the level of staff’s commitment with their work, and their capacity to innovate and adapt to new challenges faster.

Step 6. Involve them in your vision

If you hire someone, it means that they will become an important part of your strategic plan. Whether the new employee is a member of the cleaning team or the senior manager, everyone has a role to play in bringing the restaurant’s strategy to life.

So how are your people supposed to move towards the goal of the restaurant if they don’t even know what the goal is? It’s vital for a business’ success that employees understand your purpose and strategy for them to feel engaged and valued.

Step 7. Discipline your managers

People don’t leave companies, they leave managers. So you better make sure that the person in charge of your team is properly trained to be a good leader from the very beginning.

They must participate actively in a new employee’s onboarding, even with the help of a platform or not. They should make the newbies feel welcome and prepared in order to develop the team’s effectiveness.

Step 8. Offer development opportunities

They must participate actively in a new employee’s onboarding, even with the help of a platform or not. They should make the newbies feel welcome and prepared in order to develop the team’s effectiveness.

Everybody knows how important first impressions are. A single glance is capable of initiating a thousand assumptions in someone’s brain. Companies and corporations know this by heart, so when it’s time to introduce a new person to their team, all the efforts are put in to make sure everything leads to an exciting start.

This welcoming process is called onboarding, and although most people reduce it to just paperwork procedures, it really should be more meticulous than that.

The introduction to the team, specific roll assignments, training, schedule definition, and disclosure of the company’s policies are very crucial aspects of onboarding that can’t be done in careless ways. Each new employee must receive everything necessary for them to incorporate properly to your company from the very beginning, making sure that both their commitment and enthusiasm are in line.

Logically, onboarding isn’t a simple procedure. It takes up costs and time, specially within the restaurant industry where employee turnovers are the highest. In consequence, companies are starting to digitalize their onboarding process, acquiring virtual platforms and softwares where they can log their entire intellectual property and deliver it properly to their whole staff— the old and the new!

With management platforms such as Mr. Tomato, restaurants can register their employees information, their roles, and their schedules and publish them for their staff to view from their phones anytime. In the same way, they can upload materials such as menus, recipes, and policies and the app will not only allow visualization, but will also create entire training modules for your employees to learn as quickly and effectively as possible.

This way, companies are starting to prioritize the flow of their onboarding duties as they invest in technological solutions that ensure a satisfactory experience by half of the price. The own employees phones are now replacing expensive and time-consuming trials, meetings, manuals, and paperwork. Evolution has proven that everything can really be that simple!

Let your candidates know your company’s values from the start

• Introduction to the team
• Policies
• Complete role assignment
• Clear scheduling
• Proper training

Many people around the world have something in common: the wish of conquering, of success, of making it in that one place that everyone says makes things happen. Yes, we’re talking about THE AMERICAN DREAM. And as a rising tech company, we sure have our eyes set in that very same thing.

Sparked and born in Ukraine, Mr. Tomato caused a commotion all around Eastern Europe. More than 500 restaurants and 5000 users around the continent delightfully joined the staff management platform as an initiative to boost their team’s performance. And as you can imagine, every single one of them has its own success story to tell.

Logically, seeing all these businesses thrive with our app, we began to think: if we made it here… couldn’t we make it anywhere?

We built the wings and now it’s time to spread them. America: Mr. Tomato has arrived!

In an alliance with Puzzle Tech, we’ve been welcomed to the lovely city of Atlanta, Georgia, where we’ve installed our very first American Headquarters. The waters have been fairly tested, and by submerging ourselves in the American work culture and the American restaurant industry, we’ve discovered that Mr. Tomato and The United States are a match made in heaven.

The country is going through an employee turnover crisis, with rates as high as 75% (also known as the great resignation). There’s also a brand new generation entering the workforce, with birth certificates dated as early as 2004 and phones practically attached to their baby hands. We’re in the midst of a new era, and knowing very well that change is a universal struggle, we’re introducing Mr. Tomato to a market that needs it more than any other— a market with ambition, with a passion for growth and success.

With our unmatched training platform, we aim to simplify the lives of restaurant crews all around, making the onboarding process faster with self-assessed learning, personalized paths, and a user-friendly progress management dashboard for viewing results.

In Team Tomato, we’re all beyond excited for this new journey. So far, it seems like it’s been an amazing start and now it’s time to take over every restaurant in town!