This is an often necessary exercise that restaurants have to do just to ensure that the employees are being onboarded in the right way and to ensure that you’re going to run your restaurant like a true business – one that’s based on systems and processes, not micro-managing employees.

You need to have great staff, and even if they are falling short, it’s likely that you didn’t have the right systems in place for them to be absolutely amazing at their job. When you fire everyone and essentially start again, everyone is going to go through the exact same process and follow all the same rules.

STEP 1: INTERVIEW PROPERLY

Yes, interview them again. You’ve learned a lot since you’ve hired some of these employees, but you’ve also forgotten a lot too. Find out what makes them tick, what kind of challenges they had at previous jobs, what they look forward to the most.

STEP 2: PAPERWORK

A lot of times we get busy and slip on some of the paperwork. You need to make sure that’s all updated and that you have the right paperwork on file for whatever country or state you’re in.

STEP 3: ONBOARDING

This is the most important three or four hours of your employees journey with you. You need to share the vision and mission you have for your restaurant with your employee. No one is going to be able to deliver that to anyone the way you can. Talk about your core values and find out about theirs to make sure that they’re aligned.

Go through job descriptions, duties and responsibilities. Go through it line by line and then have the employee it sign it and put it into their file. This way they can never come back and say that they didn’t know something was part of their job or that they weren’t shown how to do it properly.

STEP 4: PATH TO PROMOTION

Your employees who come in at the bottom need to know how they can go from being a dishwasher to a line cook or from line cook to manager. Without a path to promotion, they’re only going to keep asking for raises, but if you clearly define that in order to be a cook you have to know all of these skills, pass this test and show 100% accuracy on XYZ for six months straight, then when they ask for a raise, you can show them what needs to be done over the next six months to make that happen. Each job position and pay rate is determined by a set of criteria so your staff know how to get promoted.

I follow a system called WHY DO, HOW DO, I DO, WE DO, YOU DO – it’s a five-step system. Scroll below to download my 5 Step Training System.