Member Blog

If you can only go to one CHART conference per year, should it be winter or summer? The age-old debate has flared up again. Here is my perspective, advocating for the winter conference, while Gabe Hosler counters that the summer event would prove more valuable for attendees.

Icebreakers are an underutilized tool, yet are so valuable to defeat social anxiety, warm up the group, and get everyone connected and engaged. Here are 7 of my go-to icebreakers that work every time.

In celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15th through October 15th), Denise Morales reflects on the true meaning of familia, and suggests hosting a fiesta featuring Latin American food and music. Recognize the contributions of Latinos and Hispanics to our American culture, and celebrate Hispanic traditions and values this Hispanic Heritage Month!

The panel discussion, Train the Future: Attracting and Upskilling Your Top Talent, presented at CHART Austin, focused on best practices for creating career growth opportunities for hourly team members in hotels and restaurants. Here are 5 tips to create a structure of upskilling and promoting team members from within, along with developing the culture to support attraction and retention of talent in the hospitality industry.

The breakout, Culture Reset: Strengthening Your Business from the Inside Out, was presented by Braxton Luzier at CHART Austin. Good culture drives engagement, performance, and retention, and is perceived by every guest who walks through the door. Here are the four phases of optimizing your restaurant's culture.

As the hospitality industry continues to face staffing shortages, restaurants need to find ways to compete for talent against so-called "gig work." While gig work is appealing for its flexibility, there are substantial disadvantages as well. The opportunity for restaurants, then, is to find ways to mimic the advantages of gig work while also highlighting their own advantages over the gig economy. Here are five key ideas restaurants can implement to compete for talent in the gig economy.

A training revolution is required if we are to have any hope of reaching and engaging today’s workforce. Employers will have to revise both the content and delivery of their training programs to adapt to this new audience. Here are a few personal observations and proven best practices to help you overhaul your company's approach to training and development.

One of the big challenges when it’s time for your team to make an investment in technology is to figure out who you should be considering as a vendor (and which companies you should avoid). Here are the 10 sources I use to efficiently develop my shortlist of tech suppliers.

The breakout, Training Data Analytics: Measuring the Bottom Line Impact of a Good Company Culture, was presented by Carlo Cesario and Joe Wagner at CHART Austin. Participants took part in a hands-on exercise to identify ways to quantify and measure the impact of culture on their own organizations. Here are my key takeaways from this session.

Hospitality companies will often go to great lengths to ensure that guests feel welcome, appreciated, and comfortable, but can they say the same about all their employees, especially the growing number of workers who are gender-nonconforming? Here are 5 suggestions you can use to start creating a more inclusive workplace for gender-diverse individuals.

In this Member Spotlight, Kelly shares her first encounter with restaurant lingo, the three reasons that things don't get done, and the training myth she wants to bust.

A certified trainer program can give existing hourly employees an opportunity for growth and the skills, knowledge, and tools that they need to rapidly onboard new employees. Here are five key components of a certified trainer program that can decrease time to productivity, enhance employee experience and engagement, and ultimately increase retention.