Restaurant staff retention has always been a challenge for the food service industry. According to leading POS (point of sale) provider Toast, restaurants had an average annual turnover rate of 79.6 percent over the last decade. This means that most restaurants churn the majority of their staff every single year!
This is an expensive, disruptive, and constant challenge for owners. High turnover rates raise the costs of recruitment and staff training for restaurants while diminishing quality control and customer experience.
Offering higher pay and benefits can help reduce turnover. But with most restaurants operating on already-slim margins, there are obviously limits to what you can pay your employees.
So how can you improve retention rates without jacking up your costs? Cross-training may be one answer to this question. We wanted to find out exactly how cross-training can lead to better restaurant staff retention, so we caught up with founder and CEO of MISEbox, Dana Koteen.
MISEbox provides customizable training templates for restaurants, as well as valuable internal communication tools, informational resources, and performance insights. Dana offered some great insight into the role that enhanced training can play in improving restaurant employee retention.
What Is Restaurant Cross-Training?
In the restaurant industry, cross-training involves teaching your employees new skills outside of their everyday responsibilities. The goal is to create a more adaptable staff where team members can fill in for last-minute absentees, take on more tasks during busy shifts, and provide support to other team members when there are delays.
Ultimately, cross-training is about creating a team with maximum flexibility. But what does that flexibility have to do with reducing turnover rates?
5 Ways Cross-Training Improves Restaurant Staff Retention
A 2024 study from the World Journal of Advanced Research and Reviews concludes that there is “a significant relationship between [a] Cross-training program and its effect on the growth and retention of employees.”
The primary reason, says the study, is that cross-training directly benefits employees by giving them valuable skills and improving their career prospects within the restaurant industry. Below, we take a closer look at exactly how this translates into lower turnover rates and improved restaurant staff retention.
1. Stronger Personal Motivation
lack of opportunity for career advancement. “We have one of the worst turnover rates of any industry,” says Dana. “It's very easy to leave and change jobs. After all, you can be a server basically anywhere.” Cross-training offers an organic solution to this problem.
“People need more than money to be motivated,” says Dana. “There are massive generational shifts — the young millennials and Gen Z face enormous economic challenges.” These challenges are requiring younger workers to adjust their career expectations.
“One of the adjustments we've made,” says Dana, “is that we really need to believe in what we’re doing. We want to be engaged in what we’re doing. You want to have influence in what we’re doing. A training program can really provide that.”
2. Greater Career Mobility
Of course, it’s more than just a vote of confidence. Restaurant workers who train in a variety of skills and areas of operation can naturally open new professional doorways. Cross-training can give ambitious team members the practical skills and direction to advance into more senior roles.
“I would encourage any restaurant to provide as much opportunity for cross-training as possible,” says Dana. “Because if you can get somebody who knows your brand, knows your people, is comfortable in your space, that's a ton of training that you don't have to do. So it's much easier to take a cook and turn them into a server.”
“That may not seem obvious,” says Dana, “but they know the menu. So now you just have to teach them how to operate in the room, and maybe cultivate some of their verbiage. So it's all tied together in that way.”
3. More Efficient Shift Staffing
Cross-training can ultimately make life easier and less stressful for employees on both sides of the kitchen doors. Arming staff members with a wider set of skills means your employees can easily jump in and fulfill a variety of roles outside of their everyday duties.
“For example, if you can provide broad cross training opportunities where a server has a shift behind the bar maybe once a week when you need someone to fill in,” says Dana, “you've got that person already. This can be super helpful.”
Subscribe to Our Monthly HR & Staffing Newsletter
Find solutions for hiring, scheduling, and retaining top talent in today's competitive market.
Servers who are trained in hosting duties can jump in and help out when there’s a long line of walk-ins. Kitchen staff who learn a few basic customer service skills can provide food running support during busy shifts. Managers with food prep training can jump on the line and help when the kitchen staff gets backed up.
Now, when somebody calls in sick, you have a lot more moving pieces on your staff to help fill in the gap. Ultimately, this translates into less pressure on individual staff members, higher morale, and a strong line of defense against burnout and turnover.
4. Stronger Communication and Deeper Collaboration
According to an article from Push Operations, 72 percent of restaurant employees say communication is extremely important to their workplace satisfaction. Cross-training will naturally open channels for interaction between your front- and back-of-house employees. “That’s because it's important to engage your team and understand what they are interested in,” Dana says.
But it’s just as important to create a broader culture where employees are aware of the opportunities available to them. Dana explains that in a restaurant with an open, communicative, and collaborative culture, “We are always training. Anytime we're open, we are training our team. Presenting those opportunities is incredibly important.”
“After all,” says Dana, “You never know what you're going to spark in someone who maybe didn't even know that they were interested in learning a particular skill.”
5. Active Succession Planning
Employee growth and organizational growth go hand in hand. Cross-training is a great strategy for achieving both.
“Restaurants are not always focused on succession planning, which is part of the retention challenge,” says Dana. “The way turnover usually happens, it’s like, all of a sudden we don't have a bartender. All of a sudden we don't have a server, and we have to adjust to that. I think as you bring up your retention rates, that decreases.”
Cross-training can help shine the spotlight on a server with strong managerial skills, a prep chef with the right personality for running a kitchen shift, or an assistant manager who could be running their own location. With effective cross-training, your restaurant can move swiftly to replace departing employees from within and recruit in-house talent for new leadership opportunities.
Tips for Effective Restaurant Cross-Training
So how exactly can you initiate a cross-training program in your restaurant? Below are a few practical tips.
- Encourage communication among employees in every part of your operation, including management. Create an open-door policy for feedback and questions.
- Create standard operating procedures so cross-trained employees know when they might be asked to fill in for absent staff members or provide task support to teammates.
- Foster mentorship relationships where team members shadow each other to learn new skills. Identify some of your top employees who can play a direct role in training their co-workers in specific areas.
- Focus on recruiting candidates who are interested in cross-training opportunities from the very start.
- Explore tech-based training tools to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of training, especially in ways that won’t interfere with your team’s everyday responsibilities.
A Closer Look at Some Lead Restaurant Staff Training Tech
Some of the leading tech-based solutions make it possible to seamlessly integrate cross-training activities with everyday operations. Dana notes that MISEbox can be especially helpful for restaurants scaling upward while still looking for ways to customize training for each individual location.
As Dana explains, “Based on how you operate and the number of people you have working for you, there is a need for consistency across the board with multi-unit, multi-concept operations. But you also have the need for each of those concepts to manage their team and their information and their training programs in their individual spaces. The way that our system is built helps facilitate that and streamlines it.”
Not only does MISEbox streamline that information, it also maximizes accessibility across your entire team. “And that,” says Dana, “is kind of the point of cross training. A busser or a bar back has the same access to information that the server does, which can inherently just create this program of education.”
Explore All of Your Options
Find out how your restaurant could benefit from a tech-based training solution like MISEbox. Our in-house technology consultants are ready to help you choose the best technology for your restaurant staff training needs. Schedule your free, personalized consultation today!
