The Training Nobody Assigns Is the Training That Actually Happens

Here's where it gets interesting. At both of my Chicago spots, something started happening after we put menu quizzes on staff phones. People were retaking them. Not because a manager told them to. Not because there was a consequence for a low score. They were doing it on their break, before a shift, sometimes after close, because their name was on a leaderboard and someone else was ranked above them. That's it. That was the whole mechanism.

I've been in this business since I was washing dishes in my twenties, and I've seen a lot of training initiatives come and go. Almost all of them required the operator to push. This was the first time I watched training pull people in on its own.

Think about the difference there. A required module creates a transaction. The employee gives you time, you give them a checkmark. A visible score next to a coworker's name creates something completely different. It creates a story about themselves that they want to change.

A 22-year-old server is not going to read three pages about your roasted chicken because you told them to. But that same person will retake a chicken quiz four times if the guy they work Thursday nights with is sitting two spots above them on the board. The content didn't change. The context did.

This is the part most training conversations in restaurants skip entirely. We spend all our energy on what to teach and almost none on what makes people want to learn it. The assumption is that if the information is important enough, people will absorb it because they understand it's important. That assumption has never once held up in a kitchen. People learn what they care about, and caring is situational. Leaderboards create a situation where caring is the natural response.

There's a word for this in game design: feedback loops. When someone can see their own score, compare it to someone they know, and then take an action that immediately changes the number, the brain treats that as a game worth playing. It doesn't matter that the content is "what are the ingredients in our chipotle ranch." The loop is the same loop. That's why it works on a server at a sports bar just as well as it works on someone playing a phone game at midnight.

Now let me tell you what surprised me most. The competition wasn't cutthroat. People were talking about the quizzes. Staff who'd been there three years were helping newer hires understand the menu better because they wanted the whole crew sharp. The leaderboard created conversation about the food in a way that a pre-shift briefing almost never does. The training became social. And once training goes social, you don't have to manage it anymore.

Nobody talks about their scores from a compliance module. Nobody texts a coworker, "hey, did you get the allergen acknowledgment signed?" But people absolutely talk about where they rank. They talk about which questions tripped them up. They get annoyed when someone they hire passes them on the board in a week. All of that is exactly the behavior you're trying to produce when you hand someone that binder, except the binder never produces it.

The research on turnover in this industry is grim. Cornell's Tracey and Hinkin study put the replacement cost per hourly employee at $5,864. The National Restaurant Association has consistently reported turnover rates running 75 to 80 percent. Those numbers get cited a lot in conversations about retention, compensation, scheduling. They get cited a lot less in conversations about training design, which is where I think a real chunk of the problem actually lives. People leave jobs where they don't feel competent. They leave when they get embarrassed in front of a table because they didn't know the menu well enough. That embarrassment is preventable if the training sticks. And training sticks when people choose to go back to it.

Required training doesn't get you that second visit to the material. Friendly competition does.

The platform I built at ShiftTrained was designed with this in mind from the start, because I watched the compliance model fail for thirty years and I wanted to build something that didn't rely on the manager following up or the employee being unusually conscientious. The leaderboard isn't a feature bolted on. It's the whole theory.

You can build some version of this without any technology at all, by the way. Post quiz scores publicly. Time your team on verbal menu recitation and put the times on a whiteboard. Create a small weekly stakes situation around food knowledge. The specific tool matters less than the visibility. People need to see how they stack up against someone they actually know. That's what turns a chore into something they'll come back to on their own.

Nobody voluntarily re-reads the binder. Give them a reason to care about the score, and they'll do the work without you asking.

Have a great day! — Terry Psaltakis
Your AI Restaurant Guy

For more on putting this into practice, see how ShiftTrained approaches the best menu training programs.