You may think that fast food restaurants and high turnover rates are synonymous with one another, which is usually right. However, a few fast food restaurants are bucking this trend and changing their company cultures to ensure that they retain good talent longer.
Hire for Attitude, Train for Skill
Fast food restaurants can take a valuable tip from successful companies, such as Google, and hire employees with good attitudes to help avoid high turnover rates. Employees that have good attitudes will help improve customers’ experiences, and they are more likely to be happy with themselves, which directly transfers over to work performance.
The primary demographic for fast-food restaurant employees are part-time people and teenagers. It’s easier to groom young employees that have an excellent attitude and train them with the skills they need to succeed in their jobs than it is to try to teach someone that is negative and doesn’t have the desire to succeed.
Opportunities for Improvement Decrease High Turnover Rates
It’s important that fast food restaurants train their employees, retrain them, provide them with certifications and then re-certification. For example, the most successful fast food restaurants that have low employee turnover invest in 100 to 120 hours of training and require certifications for each specific job before employees go on the line. Re-certification is essential – and easy to institute via random drawings and pop quizzes – because people get rusty and can get stuck in ruts. It’s best to keep people on their toes, so their knowledge is up-to-date.
Leaders are Teachers
It may seem silly, but there’s a lot of truth in having good leaders that are teachers. Some companies organize management to read a range of books each month. Management then meets to discuss these books, whether it’s classic literature or the latest business self-help guide. Leaders are teachers, and when a company recognizes them as coaches for the staff, they feel more motivated to do their jobs, and those under them feel and share that same enthusiasm.
Having a culture that treats management well will also help employees aspire to work their way up in a company and become management too.
Some companies wonder if it’s worth training fast food employees and investing valuable time, resources and money in them when most of them will not make a life-long career in the industry. However, consider this point. If you don’t invest in your employees, you will have high turnover rates, which directly impacts customers’ and their experience with your restaurant.
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