7 Practical Tips to Train New Staff On Your Restaurant’s POS for Better Speed, Accuracy, and Customer Experience

It’s beyond frustrating when you put time and resources into training new recruits, and they still take forever to learn your menu and input orders on your POS.

If you can’t quickly train your staff, your service will be slow, the customer experience will suffer, and you’ll lose business. But there are ways to improve training and get your new team members to take orders faster, more accurately, and with a friendly smile. 

Empowering your managers with better training practices will not only elevate the standard of service, but will also bolster the confidence of your staff.

We looked into the best training practices and methods to quickly turn your staff into power users. Below are seven practical tips to improve speed, accuracy, and customer experience at the counter.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

• Reasons your staff might be struggling to get up to speed with your menu
• Practical tips to improve your staff training for a more confident and motivated workforce
• The technology that helps staff learn faster and serve customers more efficiently

By the end, you’ll leave the stress of unmotivated, slow-moving staff behind, and welcome a well-trained workforce that takes orders faster, with fewer mistakes, and gives your customers an all-around better experience.

Why Are Staff Struggling with Your Menu on Your POS?

To improve your training, you have to first figure out what’s going wrong. If you have a persistent issue with new recruits taking too long to learn how to enter orders into the POS system, there must be a reason. 

Assuming you don’t want to simplify the menu, here are some candidates: 

• Your staff are unfamiliar with how the menu is structured.
• Your staff aren’t motivated to work faster and more efficiently.
• Your POS system isn’t user-friendly.
• Your POS system isn’t built for speed. 
• Your POS is unsuitable for a complex menu.

If you think the problem lies with your tech setup, there’s an easy way to improve that part of the puzzle:

Try HungerRush 360, the POS system built for faster order-taking at restaurants with complex menus.

But beyond changing your tech setup, there are a few practical ways to improve your training and turn your staff into motivated power users.

7 Tips to Improve Staff Training on Your POS System

1. Give Employees and Managers Time to Explore and Practice

When speed and efficiency are the priority, your staff might feel like they’re always in a rush to take orders — and don’t have time to get to know the POS system outside the pressures of service. 

Allow your managers and employees time before it gets busy to play around with the system and explore the full extent of the menu. Staff can create dummy orders and practice inputting orders faster while keeping accuracy high. And managers can go through their best practices and techniques with employees at their own pace. 

2. Offer Performance Incentives and Team Competitions

People love competing. A simple contest can turn the most mundane activities into fun games for your teams. See who can input a complicated order the fastest, who can make the fewest errors, and who gets the best customer feedback scores. 

Reward the winners with titles, free meals, or extra vacation days, and you’ll soon realize the power of motivating people to be at their best.

If you have multiple outlets, setting up competitions between stores can be even more effective. Working together to beat other stores can be a powerful motivator and a way to build a strong bond within your restaurant teams.

3. Ask for Staff Feedback

One of the best ways to improve your training is to ask employees for their opinions — what works, what could be improved, and what would they like to see on the training plan. Ask existing employees what was most helpful for them at the beginning and act on the feedback to improve your training going forward.

Try asking open-ended questions that encourage employees to be honest about the challenges they face and how they can be resolved. 

Here are some ideas to get you started:

• How can the practical demonstrations of POS order-taking be more helpful?
• How clear are the trainer’s explanations? How could they be improved?
• What could we do to help you understand the structure of the menu?
• What challenges do you come across that slow down order-taking?
• What areas of staff training need improvement?

4. Teach Troubleshooting

It’s great to have a team that can input orders faster with fewer mistakes. But they also need to be able to react and adapt when things go wrong. A printer jam or network failure can hold up the line if not dealt with promptly. And staff who’ve never come across these situations may not know what to do.

Dedicate a portion of your training schedule to troubleshooting common problems. Encourage staff to take initiative and solve problems on their own. 

Prepare your staff for the worst and you’ll likely bring out their best. Make sure they know the steps to take if they come across ordering problems, such as: 

• Card reader failure
• Rude or abusive customers
• Network failure
• Printer jam

5. Create a Menu Mind Map

Many people learn better with visual aids that help them picture a complex concept on one page. A mind map could help your staff understand how different menu items interact with each other and get their heads around the menu as a whole. 

Create a mind map of the menu with new recruits, allowing them to pick out the categories and group items together. If you run an Italian restaurant, you might organize it into pizza, pasta, appetizers, sides, and desserts, and branch the menu items from the menu sections. 

It makes sense to arrange the mind map in the same structure as the menu screens on your POS system. This will help staff learn the menu and become comfortable with inputting orders into the POS system faster. 

6. Involve Employees in Customizing Order Screens

The best POS systems allow you to customize how your menu appears on the screen. You can add fast-order buttons for popular items, create a custom menu flow, and make your order screens as efficient as possible. 

A great way to get your staff engaged in learning how to input orders faster is to empower them to create the best configuration of menu screens possible. Not only will this give you more options for speedy order screens, but it will also get your teams engaged in thinking about how to most efficiently serve customers.

7. Get the Front of House Active in the Kitchen

It might seem like a time-consuming and resource-heavy training method, but there’s no better way to understand a menu than to prepare and cook the dishes yourself. 

Get your front-of-house teams into the kitchen even for one shift to help them understand the food and menu more deeply. If you prepare food at a central production kitchen, organize a day out where in-store employees can see where the prepared food comes from. 

Your chefs can help train your staff to understand how each menu item is prepared, which ingredients go into each dish, and what it’s like to be on the other end of an order being placed. 

You’ll give a boost to team morale, help your front- and back-of-house teams understand each other better, and come away with more well-rounded and competent staff at the counter.

Engage and Motivate Your Employees with the Best POS for Complex Menus

Team training is half the battle. You’ll never have fast and efficient service with clunky, out-of-date technology. 

To give your teams the best chance of success, get the most out of your training, and keep them motivated and engaged, invest in a POS system that can handle the complexity of your menu and the speed of service you demand. 

HungerRush 360 was created with speed and accuracy as the top priority, even for restaurants with complex menus that have multiple add-ons, sides, and modifiers. HungerRush 360 can handle busy pizza delivery restaurants with hundreds of toppings, as well as quick-service sandwich and Mexican menus that offer nearly unlimited combinations of ingredients.

Need a POS system that can keep up with your speedy staff? Try HungerRush 360.

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