6 Reasons Restaurant Employee Training Videos are Vital to Service

Training new restaurant employees is a constant job, particularly because the industry has a turnover rate of between 130% and 150%. As a restaurant owner, you want to provide great training, but at an average employee hiring cost of over $2,000, finding ways to keep costs low is equally essential.  Providing restaurant employee training videos for your team is an important step towards ensuring great customer service, strong employee morale, and lower employee turnover rates. 

In fact, there are many reasons to consider the use of restaurant employee training videos. Outside of the improvements in customer service and general employee-to-employee behavior, consider these 6 reasons that you should be using videos to train your employees.

1. Videos Reduce Seat Time in Training Courses

If you’re still using long winded training courses to train your restaurant staff, why? These types of courses require travel to the training site, food and beverage service on site, and tons of coordination among employees. They also require a paid trainer to be on site for the duration of the training program. Worst of all, 75% of employees are going to forget 50% of what they learn at these training programs in the first 60 days! All that money spent on training wasted!

Not with video, though! Videos reduce the total seat time in training courses. With training videos, restaurant employees can receive strong, effective training in a fraction of the time without the need to travel. And a trainer can be paid one time to produce the video that can be used to train your team hundreds of times over. The icing on the cake is the fact that employees will retain significantly more from what they learn in a training video than they will from a lecture. 

2. Videos Include Interactive Elements for Engagement

Training videos can include a variety of interactive features that will increase employee engagement. For example, pop-up quizzes can be incorporated into the video training experience to quiz viewers as they learn and hotspots can be used to draw viewer attention to complementary content that helps to reinforce their training. Employees are able to engage in their training through these various interactive elements which results in an overall better learning experience.

3. Video Training is Available On Demand

Remember how we talked about those long training sessions that require insane scheduling and tons of work just to get everyone together for the training? With video, there is no scheduling! When you hire new restaurant employees, they can train immediately. When you want to move an employee into a new role, he or she can immediately begin training. There is no waiting around for the next training session.

With video, training is available on demand, anytime, anywhere. Employees love this because it makes training more accessible and convenient. Management loves it because it means they can get employees trained immediately rather than waiting around.

4. Video Training has Extended Reach

With video training, employees can train anywhere. The extended reach that video training provides for your restaurant means that you can start training newly hired employees as soon as they commit to the position. Video training is also ideal because it targets learning styles of all types. So if you have someone that learns audibly, video can target that. If you have someone that learns visually, video can provide that.  Video has great reach, can be used across wide organizations and in small restaurants, too, and is great for various learning styles.

5. Videos Provide Microlearning Opportunities

Studies have proven that long training sessions lead to learner burnout or, in other words, they overwhelm the learner. This results in substantially less information retention and an overall lower timeframe upon which the learner will retain the information that they learn in training. However, video provides microlearning opportunities. 

With microlearning, short bursts of digestible content are delivered to employees so that they can easily follow along and maximize their overall understanding and retention of information. Short video training that enhances in-person on the job training is proven to increase learner retention and improve work skills.

6. Video Training is Consistent

The use of restaurant employee training videos provides a level of consistency in training that no other format of training can provide. Instead of having 5 employees that are each trained by different management or even by the same management but in different ways, a single video can provide the essential training required across your team. Videos ensure that each restaurant employee receives the exact same type, style, and focus on training that the next employee receives.

As you can see, the use of restaurant employee training videos in your establishment can have a variety of benefits for your staff and for the customers that come into your restaurant. To learn more about producing restaurant employee training videos that you can use in the training of your staff, give Beverly Boy Productions a call. With decades of experience, we can’t wait to help you provide top notch training for your staff!