When it comes to restaurant staffing issues, we have good news and bad news. Let’s start with the good stuff. According to the National Restaurant Association’s 2025 State of the Industry Report, 32% of restaurant operators say they don’t have enough employees to manage current customer demand. Why is that good news? Because it’s actually down quite a bit from 2021, when 78% of employers said the same.
Now here’s the not-so-great news. According to the same industry report, 77% of restaurant operators still identify restaurant employee retention and recruitment as significant challenges.
Yelli founder Danielle Casilio tells us that the secret to confronting these challenges is better restaurant onboarding and training. Yelli is a digital training platform that helps streamline initial restaurant staff training, continuing education, menu testing, and more.
As Danielle tells us, this type of centralized, organized, and digitized approach to training can reduce restaurant employee turnover and have far-reaching benefits for your restaurant's internal culture. Let’s take a closer look at exactly how.
Is It Time To Modernize Your Restaurant Staff Training Strategy?
As restaurants modernize in so many other areas of their operation, training is often an afterthought. As Danielle explains, “Restaurants have scheduling apps, and checklist apps, and of course, everybody's used to having (or has heard about) a POS [point of sale] by now. Training is of one of the pieces that has been left in the dark ages. We talk to these super-modern restaurants, and they tell us, ‘We have our handbook, and that's it.’”
Danielle argues that this approach just doesn’t cut it anymore. And she would know. Before launching Yelli in 2019, she worked as a server and a director of staff training in a number of restaurants. She saw firsthand the frustration and inefficiency that team members experience in environments without a streamlined approach to restaurant staff training.
“It was really normal with every restaurant that I worked in to see messy stacks of paper, documents, and files in different places,” says Danielle. “These fine dining restaurants that were making $20 million a year in revenue and had unlimited resources — they still weren’t tapping into more formal training strategies.”
The Connection Between Onboarding, Training, and Turnover
So what does all of this disorder and frustration mean for restaurant employee retention? Danielle explains that it simultaneously makes it harder and less desirable for employees to stick around.
“From a staff perspective, if I'm coming into a new job and the onboarding process is disorganized and chaotic and all over the place, I get really frustrated, and I might not stay at that job,” says Danielle.
“And I hear a lot from operators and managers who tell me ‘We hire people and they don't always make it through training. This is so frustrating, because we spend this money to hire them and we pay people to train them and bring them on, and then they don't even get to one day on the floor.’”
Danielle points to this as proof that restaurant staff retention issues often begin with failures at the onboarding stage. She adds, “Organization, consistency and communication — those are the big pain points when it comes to training.”
5 Key Benefits of Digital Training
So what are a few strategies for treating those pain points? As Danielle tells us, “If you want to reduce turnover, and you want your team members to have everything that they need in one place, and you want to get rid of that chaos, then it's worth learning how to use the technology we have at our fingertips.”
Below, we highlight a few ways that digitizing your restaurant onboarding and training can improve performance, eliminate chaos, and reduce restaurant employee turnover.
1. Training on the Go
One of the best ways to improve restaurant staff training is to provide employees with opportunities to learn on their terms. And increasingly, your employees are on their smartphones. For many of your employees, hard-copy training material is simply outdated and counterintuitive.
“Especially with younger staff members coming in, everybody's on their phone all the time,” says Danielle. “They don't read the long handouts. If you want them to be able to retain that information and look at it more than once before throwing it in their trunk, then the app-based route is the way to go.”
Not only is this approach more intuitive for your younger employees, but it also creates access to training materials anytime and anywhere.
As Danielle explains, “We take the traditional training methods that everyone's used to and digitize them. This makes it easier for everybody on the management side to organize, update, and deliver. And it makes it easier for staff to just pull it up anywhere, versus having to log into a computer somewhere.”
2. Keeping Up With the Changes
There’s a good reason to ensure that your employees have this level of constant, on-the-go access to restaurant staff training materials. As Danielle points out, “Things are always changing in restaurants, usually on the menu side, but also sometimes with procedures or guidelines on certain things. That constantly changing information adds this other layer that makes it harder to keep things organized.”
If these changes aren’t effectively communicated to your entire team, it can be crushing for both employee performance and morale. That can translate directly into reduced restaurant staff retention.
“We hear frustration from veteran staff all the time. They’ll say, ‘I've been here for X amount of years, but I still get left out of the loop if I don't make it to pre-shift,’” Danielle tells us. “So having one place where all of that information can live, where managers can just go into the app to make a change and notify everybody on the team right away — that really reduces the amount of errors that veteran team members are making just as much as new hires.”
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3. Creating Consistency
Digitizing your training strategy also provides assurance that everybody, everywhere has access to the same information. This is just as important for those who provide training as it is for those who receive it.
Speaking from her own experience as a staff trainer, Danielle recalls that “it would be stressful for me to not know what was going on. And then once I did know what was going on, and I was training new people, the amount of work it took to make sure they knew everything was really draining.”
Not only was it draining, but it was also a deeply inefficient and scattershot way to provide restaurant staff training. As Danielle explains, “It’s about consistency – making sure that every server that comes in gets the same training and not something different based on who is training them that day or what manager is working.”
Of course, the human element of training remains central. Danielle explains that digital training strategies are meant to “supplement in-person training. It doesn't replace in-person training. It just acts as the one source of truth during training, whether that's for the staff, the manager, or the trainer.”
4. Simplifying Your Training Program
Danielle observes that another major source of failure for restaurants using old-fashioned staff training methods is the sheer complexity of their approach. As Danielle tells us, “One thing that we see over and over again is content that is overly complicated for what it is, or training materials that say the same thing five different ways across a 50-page document.”
Neither staff members nor managers have the time to deal with training materials designed this way. And it’s also not a very practical way to learn or retain information. Danielle says the focus needs to be on “getting that information simplified. Boiling it down to what your team needs to know to go out, serve guests, and give them a good experience. That's it.”
That’s why Yelli’s training materials are designed for maximum ease of use. Danielle explains, “Everything is in flashcard format. We really wanted to make it easy for people to learn the information in that bite-sized piece. So everything from the menus to the uniforms to table numbers are all in flashcard format. That makes it easy for everybody on the team to digest or look up.”
5. Raising Morale
Internal culture and worker morale are major determinants of restaurant employee retention. Danielle observes that restaurants with inconsistent training models are far more vulnerable to low morale. But with digital training, “The biggest thing we hear is the team is happier. We hear how the trainers' lives are better and that new team members are impressed with the training when they come in.”
“This is an effective way to reduce restaurant employee turnover,” Danielle points out, “because new hires come in and say, ‘This place has their stuff together. They're going out of their way to give me these tools. Right off the bat, I think my life working here is going to be better for that.”
Not only does this lead to improved retention, but Danielle observes anecdotally that quite a few of her own clients have parlayed this improved retention into growth. She explains, “We’ve seen restaurants that have used us grow faster than they expected and ended up opening new restaurants or new stores.”
Choosing the Right Tech for Training and More
This newfound ability to scale upward underscores just how big an impact better restaurant employee retention can have on the bottom line. It also suggests there are other operational benefits that come with improved training methods, including better employee performance, improved customer experiences, and reduced waste.
In addition to digitizing your training strategy, there are a number of other affordable and accessible tools that can help you raise morale, retain employees, and improve your operations. To find out more, schedule your free, personalized consultation with one of our in-house experts today!
