January 9, 2009
Created in cooperation with the Council of Hotel and Restaurant Trainers
by Chris Beckler, Senior Director of Training, and Susan Lynn, Senior Training Manager, Logan's Roadhouse
The most successful restaurants are successful because they provide consistent value to their customers. Often, restaurateurs believe that creating consistency is difficult, but with proper training, it's achievable.
The first step in creating consistency is to create your company's core fundamentals and then repeat those fundamentals. At Logan's Roadhouse, our core fundamentals include great-tasting food in a timely manner; serving hot food hot and cold food cold; clean and safe restaurant environments; and great, warm, friendly service.
We use three tools to teach our team and managers daily. They are: purpose, values, and brand. If you put together the communication of core fundamentals with these tools, it inevitably leads to lower turnover.
In order to teach your team and managers daily, every restaurant organization needs to come up with the purpose of their training department. At Logan's, that purpose is: "We are committed to training Logan's values every day. We learn, live, and teach a culture and passion for 'Guest First' thinking, which will be a distinct competitive advantage and support the growth of the Logan's brand."
It's great to have your defined purpose and all the materials in line to support that purpose. But what happens if you have all your elements together and your team members and managers still aren't getting the message? They have the information, so why aren't they getting it? The answer might be that you need to simplify.
In order to simplify, Logan's had to create an effective Foundation Based Training Program. First, we created a systematic approach to communicating purpose, values, and brand. We then taught the how's and why's and a passion for guest-first thinking. We continually repeat core operational necessities on a quarterly rotation, designed to ensure that we are upholding Logan's standards.
The mentality in the past was to give our managers and team members a huge list of things to accomplish. Now we have taken it to a smaller level so that it looks more doable, and we give them aids to be successful. For example, we might give managers the how-to's for team member selection and make sure they get the material two weeks ahead of time—allowing the general manager time to prepare and delegate tasks ahead of time while developing the team.
Here's an overview of Foundation Based Training (FBT):
What's a Validation Book? It's another way we simplified FBT. Each Validation Book is divided into three sections: daily (which includes checklists and line checks), weekly (the manager's meeting outline), and quarterly (including health inspections, administrative reviews, minimum staffing pars, and training validations).
The Validation Book is designed to teach and coach. It clearly sets expectations and teaches the how and why to achieve these expectations. It validates consistency, creates accountability and follow-through, and gives GMs the opportunity to redirect and coach those who fall short of expectations, thus leading to operational consistency.
These measures have helped us to have synergy with our organization on all levels from the front of the house to the back of the house, from Risk Management to Marketing. We have continued to lower management turnover, we have had 19 consecutive quarters with flat or positive same-store sales growth, morale is great, and we have a useful tool that will enable us to continue to grow.
