Member Blog

Two years ago, as Director of Recruiting and Training for Ivar’s Restaurants, I applied to join the Executive Track Competency Capstone session that would be taking place on the Saturday of the CHART conference in Charleston. Once the session got underway, my thinking began to radically change for three reasons.

A familiar scenario often occurs within organizations. Our team members, with a “check the box” mentality, believe that the path to a promotion is a matter of completing certain subscribed training tasks and programs. In doing so, mission accomplished…or is it?

Ever been fooled by a great interview, only to find out later that he or she wasn't a great fit? Here's what we recommend to ensure you hire the right person the first time.

Most people who have worked in the hospitality industry know the importance of strong teamwork in their operations. When a team doesn’t work well together during a shift, it seems like everything starts to increase: lines, wait times, stress levels, and tempers. If allowed to continue from day to day, a hotel or restaurant with poor teamwork can soon expect everything to start to decrease: guest satisfaction, return visits, employee tenure, and profits.

Engaging workers in their twenties and thirties to stay with your company can be a challenge, but it may not be as difficult as you think. The current generation of workers comprises 35% of the labor force in the United States and they’re steadily moving up through the ranks into management positions. They job-hop at least 20 times in search of job fulfillment, mobility and work-life balance, resulting in lower management retention.

David Ross had a problem. His hands. He didn’t know what to do with them. Hoisted on the shoulders of his jubilant teammates who were carrying him off the field like a Roman conqueror, the aging, perennial back-up catcher, fumbled and flailed, ear-to-ear grin not withstanding. The Cubs had just won the World Series in a spectacular Game Seven, and as he and his teammates swarmed each other in an impromptu post-World Series victory melee, the simple fact was he did not know what to do with his hands while riding those shoulders.

At the conclusion of our 96th Hospitality Training Conference in Boca Raton, with the new board of directors in place and a full agenda of projects on our plate, my first official act as CHART president was to ... take a vacation. My family and I boarded a plane at the Fort Lauderdale airport and soon landed in Key West, where we spent 5 wonderfully peaceful days enjoying each other's company.

Even though it was more than 17 years ago, I remember almost everything about the morning of February 28, 2001. It was Ash Wednesday, a big sales day for seafood restaurants, and I was working as the manager-in-charge of our quick-service location in Everett, Washington. I remember my team on that day consisted of Barbara, a 15-year Ivar’s veteran, and Jordan, who had only been with the company for a few months, and we all worked very hard to prepare for the many guests we were expecting.

Have you decided to take the leap from paper-based materials to online learning but are not quite sure where to start? You’re not alone. Since this transition can seem overwhelming, many companies find it helpful to approach the shift to online learning in phases. The key is to remember this is not a mad dash to the finish line, but rather a purposeful evolution that continues to assess, respond and adapt to how the new programs are being adopted and used by your learners.

How many of you are experiencing growing pains? Moving from a small to mid-size company to rapidly building out multiple locations each year? My current growing pain is capturing never ending “tribal knowledge,” information passed down from person to person, which gets diluted over time. My department’s job is to dig into “what do our team members know in our Legacy locations” (that is not found in ANY type of training material) versus “what our team members know in our newest locations.” We strive for what we call “One Habit, One Sound.”

The hospitality industry has faced many challenges in the past few years: a shortage of available workers and changing demands from consumers. But one of the biggest challenges has been from the barrage of new local and state laws (increases in minimum wages, scheduling requirements, ban the box, paid sick leave, etc.) that have forced substantial changes in pricing, operations and administration to accommodate these rules.

According to the 2017 Trends in Hospitality Training & Development Study conducted by TDN2K/People Report and the Council of Hotel and Restaurant Trainers, hospitality companies that spend 10% of their ongoing management training on human resources related topics tend to have much lower management turnover rates than those that spend little or no time on these topics. In this article, we’re going to dig into why that’s the case and what you can do to beef up your management training programs.