If you’re in the hospitality industry, opting for eLearning via LMS will benefit your operations greatly, particularly at this time of year!
The holidays are traditionally one of the busiest seasons for hospitality. You may run a restaurant and see an uptick in bookings for family get-togethers and corporate Christmas parties. Perhaps you’re a hotel offering winter breaks and accommodation for those travelling to visit relatives. Either way, you’ll likely need to take on more staff to cope with demand.
Investing in new staff to meet customer service requirements can be an expensive business in terms of both time and money, but here’s where Learning Management Systems can step in. Bringing new recruits rapidly up to speed is critical for ensuring the holiday season runs smoothly, but the old-school way of training them on the job isn’t always efficient. Relying on experienced employees to get new hires started takes them away from their daily duties, and classroom training is a pricey enterprise that costs each time you run a course.
Speedy Digital Onboarding For New Staff
However, if you’ve adopted an LMS, you can use online training to deliver a whole range of onboarding materials to fresh faces – and you can even do this before they hit the shop floor. Important information in the form of contracts, company policy, and procedures can all be disseminated via your eLearning software, speeding up the initial induction process.
Your Learning Management System can also offer multiple ways to introduce new team members to your company culture and mission. This means that from the moment they’re hired you can bring them into your workforce with a warm welcome and instil a desire to contribute.
Managing Multiple Hires Easily
While one of the benefits of onboarding via LMS is time-saving when disseminating essential information, it also provides administrators support if you’re taking on a high volume of recruits to meet client demand. Managing a number of new folks as they navigate their first week can be tricky, but with eLearning, HR or Learning & Development Managers can automate their own tasks and track employee progress. This kind of overview provided by an LMS ultimately reduces errors and prevents new people from feeling lost at sea as they begin their careers with you. For example, from their LMS dashboard, admins can see what information every new employee has received and their level of engagement with it.
The result? New starters feel more confident, and your HR team can manage their time more effectively!
Pre-Start Online Training With Your LMS
Great employee training is the bedrock of great customer service, and with online learning, you can familiarise your new team members with essential skills from the moment they sign their contract with you.
Settling into a new job includes having the confidence to contribute, so use your LMS to offer comprehensive eLearning ahead of the big first day. This can include things like videos to demonstrate basic procedures or documents that help new staff understand the service standards you expect. While this supports individuals to hit the ground running on their first shift, it also has the benefit of allowing their managers to see how they’ve scored on any initial mini-quizzes or tests and if more support is needed before meeting clients face-to-face.
Deliver Hospitality Compliance Online
The hospitality sector is, of course, subject to a variety of standards and regulations that govern public health. Whether you’re in the bed & breakfast business or run a cafe, there’s a raft of compliance you’ve got to get right every day. Educating your staff about the requirements for health and safety, consumer rights, waste disposal or even GDPR is essential. We say look to your LMS to deliver this in a thorough and accessible manner.
Cloud-based eLearning can train any employee on the issues relevant to your company while your HR team monitors their progress. Since compliance laws are frequently changing, online learning is the ideal delivery system thanks to its flexible nature: if a procedure changes, update the course and roll it out to your whole company simultaneously.
Additionally, your LMS offers the possibility of automating certification to your staff. For instance, food hygiene certificates can be automatically awarded to employees who have successfully undertaken a course. These qualifications will help them perform their work safely in the knowledge they’re getting it right. Penalties for irregular practice can be high or even jeopardise your entire operation, but you can use your Learning Management system to avoid this altogether.
Cost Effective Learning & Development
Investing in an LMS for your hospitality business completely digitises the training experience which makes for a more dynamic, comprehensive and cost-effective L&D department.
The traditional approach of bringing in an instructor and printing classroom materials is expensive for several reasons but the key drawback is that booking a space and hiring a speaker to give a lecture costs you money every time you do it. With eLearning, that training experience is created once, stored within your LMS and can be delivered to hundreds of employees whenever you need to cover a particular topic. Plus, those learners can complete that online training when and where it suits them.
Using an LMS not only allows you to create fun gamified eLearning for your employees, but it also frees up a significant chunk of your training budget to invest in other areas of your business. Who needs the expense of stacks of paper when essential material can be stored in a cloud-based LMS?
Track Learner Progress Via Your LMS
Making sure new staff have the information they need to become skilled members of your team is one advantage of employing an LMS for your hospitality business. Another is the ability to monitor and assist those individuals as they progress.
Most Learning Management Systems now offer robust dashboards where administrators can access great reporting and analytics tools. Rolling out the necessary courses and modules is one thing, but learner engagement and success are critical data to look at if you want to keep everyone on a valuable learning journey. With eLearning, you can drill down into how your folks are doing as a company, or individually and then offer additional support or courses where you think it’s needed. Managers can stay up-to-date with automatically delivered reports, which means they can see who deserves a promotion and who might be struggling and need a little more attention to thrive.
Excellent reporting tools can also help you develop fantastic courses; if a significant number of learners are finding a module hard to pass, it may be that the training material itself needs amending. In the end, the benefit of online training is visibility because you can see which courses are working well and how everyone is doing at the touch of a button.
So here are the top five reasons you should be using an LMS for your hospitality business as the holidays kick in:
You can onboard as many new folks as you need simultaneously.
You can introduce them to everything they need to know on their first day before they arrive.
You can make sure industry compliance doesn’t become an issue and keep tabs on how
Everyone is doing skill-wise company-wide.
You can do all of this at a highly competitive price point, automatically.
And lastly, remember a Learning Management System is for life, not just for Christmas – why not enjoy the benefits all year round!