How online tools are changing training of pub staff

If you were looking for a blueprint on how not to staff a pub, then the Queen Vic in EastEnders would be a good starting point. For 30 years it has been staffed by a combination of long-serving but silent pint-pullers with a seemingly complete absence of ambition. Customers are asked to “look after the bar for a minute”, their drink hovering between counter and mouth with the word “but” forming on their lips as the incumbent owner-manager makes a bolt for the door.

As a way to develop skills, drive, loyalty and teamwork it’s clearly not the best way to go about things.

Happily, in the real world, the majority of pubs aren’t stuck in an Albert Square-like time-warp and many operators have recognised that providing staff with proper training and career development plans can attract top-notch hospitality talent, give them a sense of belonging, and help get more customers through the door because they’re getting better service.

Technological developments have also moved training up a gear, with online training provision claiming to make delivery more flexible and engaging.

CPL

CPL Online provides tailored training and development plans for staff for several major pub operators and commercial manager Ian Forrest says they play a major role in helping clients hang on to their best people. “One of the most important things is to get the best people into the business and to make sure they stay within the industry.

“If you look back, the industry has changed a lot over the past few years and, especially with most organisations in the pub sector offering food to a high standard, they’re going to fall down without a high level of service.”

Engaging with staff

Taking training packages online has helped its trade customers with staff engagement, says Forrest. Its design teams have come up with easy-to-follow graphic representations of staff career paths, such as one based on a river running through a city for TGI Friday’s and a Tube map for Revolution bars.

Both are simple but effective ideas in helping staff see where they’ve come from, where they are and where they’re going to next. Things got even easier this year with CPL’s launch of an app which allows the 700,000 staff of pub operators who use its services access via smartphones and tablets.

“People are now coming into the trade as a career,” says Forrest, “not just for a job for six months while they wait to see what else comes up, so this helps them to visualise that their ambition can take them on to be a deputy manager, then a manager and then possibly an area role, but setting out the necessary skills that are the stepping stones on the way.”

Spirit

Its latest big customer project has been to transform Spirit Pub Company’s career pathway programme from a database-based model to an intranet-based “learning passport”. “It’s made quite a big impact on how staff see their career development from day one,” Forrest claims.

Mark Peters, Spirit’s head of learning and development, adds: “We wanted one encompassing area for e-learning and job development. The passport pulls together every bit of information an employee will need to complete as part of their job role and prepares them for the next steps in their careers.”

Keeping training in-house

For Forrest, the main reason for an operator to use an agency such as CPL rather than running training in-house is cost.

However, while Hertfordshire-based, five-strong Aspirational Pub Co outsources specialist aspects such as first aid to third parties, it prefers to keep the customer service, management and career development aspects of its training in-house under its Talent Academy umbrella.

“Our managers are highly capable of delivering that,” says Aspirational’s new managing director Aaron Moore-Saxton, former chief operating officer at Pizza Hut. “Because so much of what we do is personal to us and to do with our culture, it has to come from us. It wouldn’t have any integrity if it came from someone outside of the business.”

Soft skills

Moore-Saxton says he would like to see industry training place less emphasis on functional tasks such as making drinks and more on developing “soft skills”, in-cluding people skills and team management.

“At team member level, maybe 90% of what we do is functional and 10% is the development side but when you move up to general manager level it’s more like 50:50.”
He also thinks that pubs should set their sights high about who they recruit.

“You walk down any high street and you see signs in pubs saying ‘Staff wanted, experience required’. I’d prefer to see ‘Aspirational team members required, no experience necessary’. You can train people on the functional aspects of the business, but you can’t train them to be aspirational.”

Building

Get the building blocks in place and it should be easier to hang on to the best talent — and it’s here that cost savings can be made, argues Moore-Saxton.

“The cost of recruitment is massive, particularly from the time you’ve got vacancies and aren’t maximising sales, and the time spent training and developing new team members. High staff retention brings stability both within the business and in what the customer sees.”

Will someone please tell the Vic landlord, Mick Carter?