How to Train and Retain Back of House Employees

As a business owner, you likely understand the seemingly never-ending cycle of hiring and training. It can feel like the moment you get the kitchen fully staffed, someone else decides to move on. You’re always hiring. And with so much time and energy devoted to staffing, at times it can certainly feel like you have no time to work on long-term projects or let your creativity shine.

Industry employers have long lamented that it’s hard to keep people. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce reported that total separations in the accommodation and food service industry—separations meaning employees who quit, were fired or laid off, retired, and left for other reasons—came in at 5.9 percent in January 2024, a figure significantly higher than the 3.4 average across industries.

It can be particularly painful when a member of a restaurant’s back of house leaves. These employees, who cover a range of duties primarily in the kitchen and storage areas, often have specialized skills and training that can be difficult to replace. This makes training and retention all the more important.

Why Does the Hospitality Industry Have Such High Turnover?

A number of factors influence the especially high turnover rate in hospitality. To start, restaurants often employ a large number of students, younger workers, and seasonal staff who are looking for a short-term job, not necessarily a career.

As for the career cooks and chefs, they sometimes find that upward mobility as a culinary professional is more easily achieved by moving from one kitchen to another, rather than staying in one place. When they leave, they take their institutional knowledge as well as their specific skill sets with them, and the employer is left to try to get new employees up to speed quickly.

While you can’t do much about the nature of a young and seasonal workforce, you can encourage more skilled employees to stay by making your kitchen a more attractive place to build a career.

How Training Can Be the Key to Employee Retention

The quest for retention begins the minute a new employee is hired. Standardized training processes for new staff can start team members off on the right foot, knowing the dos and don’ts of restaurant operations according to best practices and company guidelines.

→ Skills That Back of House Employees Need

The first step toward creating standardized processes is to have a complete understanding of the roles and responsibilities your back of house staff fulfill. The list of roles can be a long one, covering everything from head chef to dishwasher, but some of the skills the back of house employees need include:

• Culinary expertise—obviously, you want your chefs and cooks to be professionals
• Knife Skills—everyone on the line needs to know what they’re doing
• Understanding of kitchen equipment
• Full knowledge of your restaurant’s menu
• Kitchen communication
• Brigade de Cuisine—employees should understand the hierarchy and information flow in a professional kitchen
• Safety and sanitation

Create Standardized Training Processes

Chances are, you’ve encountered a training “program” that looks like this:

• A new employee arrives for their first day.
• They’re introduced to George. He’s a line cook. He’ll be their trainer.
• The trainee shadows George for the day. George shows them the walk-in, dry storage, where the dumpsters are. During service, he turns back to them from time to time and explains what he’s doing as he does it.
• Occasionally, he says things like, “This is how we’re supposed to do this, but this is how I do it.”
• The new employee repeats the process for three to four days, and voila! Training is complete.

This kind of haphazard training process can lead to gaps in knowledge and inconsistencies in the kitchen. It’s not that George doesn’t want to be a good trainer. He just doesn’t know how to train restaurant employees because he doesn’t have clear guidelines to follow.

What if, instead, George had a checklist of everything he was expected to review with the trainee on each day of their training? From equipment safety procedures and sanitation standards to recipes—a written training plan, along with standard operating protocols and how-tos, can make new employees feel firmly grounded in the kitchen’s operations.

You can immediately set expectations of professionalism and efficiency by providing a new employee with a thorough and clear manual along with a mentor who is well versed in your procedures. Of course, the thought of drafting a training manual can be daunting for many busy business owners.

This is where Auguste Escoffier Global Solution’s customized training programs can come in. We offer onsite training, train-the-trainer programs, and consultations. These programs can be tailored specifically to your company to teach basic procedural competencies like food safety and storage, or advanced culinary skills like making perfect fresh pasta or laminated pastries. 

Boost Loyalty by Offering Employees Opportunities to Grow Their Skills

While each restaurant or food service operation should have its own written procedures, there are some skills that are better taught in a classroom by professional Chef Instructors. Every restaurant or food service operation should have its own written procedures, but it can also be a great benefit for employees to pick up an additional slate of skills taught in a classroom by professional Chef Instructors.

Competitive pay and a positive work culture can go a long way, but you can take things even further by showing employees you care about their professional development—and are willing to put your money where your mouth is. (This money, in turn, can find its way back to you when you retain employees and don’t incur the high costs of employee turnover.)

With the Work & Learn program from Escoffier Global, employees can attend culinary school online while working in your restaurant kitchen. When employers partner with Work & Learn, an employee who enrolls at Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts’ online program can have access to a scholarship. 

Employees can learn new skills and bring them into the workplace the very next day. By educating your workforce in culinary arts, baking and pastry, or plant-based culinary arts, you invest in their future, and you may gain employees who are more efficient, more knowledgeable, and more dedicated to their careers and to your restaurant.

Tips for Retaining Back of House Employees

After you’ve invested in proper training for your back of house employees, naturally you’d like to keep them. If training is about communicating your desires to the employee, retention is largely about understanding what your employee wants.

A vibrant, engaged workforce may be more likely to stay long-term, stabilizing your kitchen operations and saving you money and time. Here are some options to consider that may help with employee retention:

• Raises and/or bonuses – Employees who feel fairly compensated are more likely to stay. If there’s any room in the labor budget, a dollar raise or a performance bonus can go a long way.
• Benefits like sick leave and health insurance – Healthcare is incredibly attractive to BOH employees, since so few restaurants and hospitality businesses offer it.
• Continuing education – An investment in your staff through programs like Escoffier Global’s Work & Learn can make them more likely to stay.
• Giving back to the community – People like to work for companies they can be proud of. Charitable giving initiatives or volunteer opportunities can help employees feel that their work has purpose.
• Opportunities for growth and promotion – Do you give current employees first chance at promotions, or do you tend to look outside of the company? If employees don’t see any growth opportunities, they could be more likely to look elsewhere for their next step on the ladder.
• Positive feedback and encouragement to improve – Everyone needs to hear when they’ve done a good job. If the team really pulled together on a hard shift, give them the accolades they deserve. And on the other hand, if someone is struggling, you might show that you’re interested in their improvement with a private sit-down where you can offer helpful suggestions.

Better Training is a Smart Business Decision

Training and retention in the back of house is critical to a kitchen that runs smoothly. Not only does it make good business sense to make your kitchen attractive to career-driven cooks and chefs, but it’s the right thing to do.

With some planning, you can create a great training program and then keep those valued employees around by offering incentives they truly desire. And you’ll soon establish a reputation as a great place to work and build a career.

If you’re an employer interested in learning more about Escoffier Global’s Work & Learn program, or starting a customized training plan, contact us today!