Safety training is of paramount importance in any workplace, but it is especially important in the restaurant industry where employees are regularly expected to work around sharp blades and hot burners.
Standard training techniques often include employee meetings, written safety materials or boring and outdated safety videos. These methods may have worked in the past, but today’s modern restaurant demands a different, more efficient approach to safety training.
The Importance Of Safety Training
So we’ve established that safety training is important, but let’s take a moment to really dissect why it’s important to your restaurant.
At the top of the list; safety training helps prevent injuries or accidents in the workplace. Employees who are trained to do things like wear appropriate attire in the kitchen or simply in the act of placing no-slip mats on the floor go a long way to ensuring an accident-free workspace.
This in turn goes a long way in increasing the safety of the workspace overall, as employees will become accustomed to looking out for potential hazards and either avoiding them or going out of their way to fix them before they become a problem.
Proper safety training also helps ensure that your restaurant’s staff is familiar with your establishment’s safety protocols. This includes things like fire safety instruction and drills. This ensures that employees know what to do and where to go in the case of a fire or what to do during medical emergencies.
Finally, proper safety training helps not only protect staff but also helps ensure the safety and comfort of your customers. This, in turn, reduces the risk of liability and the potential for lawsuits or other legal action due to potentially unsafe or hazardous working conditions.
Restaurant safety tips to use in your training
Use Your Signage
Many accidents that occur in the workplace happen because of ‘undisclosed hazards’. These tend to be things like damaged flooring or spills that have been recently cleaned and have not had time to dry yet.
When training your employees, stress to them the importance of utilizing the hazard signage in your restaurant, and to ensure the others in the workplace are aware of potential hazards around them. For long-term procedural changes or safety notices, displaying alerts on your BOH screens is another easy way to signpost.
Stress The Importance Of Cleanliness
Not only does an unclean kitchen pose a health risk to your customers, but it also poses an immediate hazard to anyone working in that environment.
Slips and falls can occur from unclean floors, unwashed pans can potentially catch fire depending on what was in them and unclean knives will have a tendency to dull and slip when used. Remember: cleanliness is one of the key components of a safe kitchen.
Make Sure Staff Takes Breaks
Tired team members make mistakes, and mistakes made in the high-pressure environment of a restaurant can lead to unsafe conditions. Make sure your employees know the importance of taking a break to rest and catch their second wind before diving back into the fray.
Use the right tools to meet restaurant safety standards
The restaurant business is fast-paced and hectic, posing challenges in training both the front-of-house (FOH) team and the back-of-house (BOH) employees. Digital signage is the wave of the future when it comes to training your employees in safety protocols, and is one of the most efficient methods of disseminating training materials.
Integrating informational videos and graphics into your BOH signage can allow employees to absorb the training over a full shift, catching what they need to know in between getting orders out.
You can also utilize infographics and awareness messages to ensure that your employees stay informed about what safety procedures are and how they should be implemented.
Other useful tools for keeping your training up to date include online tests and training materials distributed through your BOH signage. UPshow Connect makes it easy to incorporate QR code technology into your digital signage so you can provide your employees with an easy method for connecting to those training materials through their mobile devices.
Rotate content to keep employees across shifts in the loop
Even the best training becomes useless if you don’t get it to all your employees. This makes it important to rotate safety training content, ensuring that all shifts receive the information they need.
It’s also important to keep your training materials current and up to date, as safety training cannot be approached with a ‘one-and-done’ attitude. Retention fades and training dulls unless it is refreshed regularly. UPshow allows you to schedule content rotation in minute detail on your digital signage, ensuring that none of your employees lack knowledge of your restaurant’s safety procedures.
What else can UPshow SHIFT do for you?
Connect with your point of sale system
UPshow SHIFT can connect directly to your point of sale system and allows you to track key performance indicators across the board. This can be integrated into your digital signage or BOH systems in a variety of ways.
By integrating with your POS system, you can easily identify which shifts or team members are upselling or promoting targeted menu items. It makes it that much easier to keep your employees performing efficiently and safely.
Keep employees engaged
Employees learn better when they are engaged and invested in the materials being offered to them. UPshow SHIFT offers a variety of ways to provide just that type of engagement to your employees when delivering training and materials to them.
Creating training quizzes and linking them to a QR code in your digital signage allows your employees to access those quizzes on their mobile devices on their own time, without shift leads needing to track them down. They’ll have immediate access to engagement metrics, so they can tell how many staff members have completed their training.
UPshow also integrates with Canva, a popular online graphics creation program. Utilizing this powerful combination allows you to create things like an employee recognition program for employees who have strong kitchen safety records.
You can also disseminate and receive back employee surveys in much the same manner. This can help you determine where your employees believe your training materials are strong, and where they may be lacking.
Make safety training a part of your back-of-house training processes
UPshow SHIFT is the premiere digital signage software for BOH safety training.
Starting with UPshow is easy, all it takes is connecting your display to the software either through a hardwire connection or by running it directly on a wifi-enabled screen. It makes it easier than ever to provide your employees with the quality training they need to excel at their jobs, all while staying safe. Want to find out how UPshow can help your BOH team members? UPshow offers free demos so schedule yours today!
