ED LEE – TRAINING & ONBOARDING MANAGER
1.What does a typical day look like for you as an Onboarding and Training Manager at Evolve Hospitality?
A typical day for me would start with checking through my emails in the morning and having a little scroll through any hospitality news that’s occurring in London. The rest of my day is filled with compliance checks, FOH onboarding sessions, upskilling sessions, reference requests and approving new candidates on the system.
2. What are the key responsibilities you handle in your role?
The key responsibilities in my job role are:
- Overseeing the FOH and BOH onboarding sessions in our London office
- Ensuring we have sufficient stock in our trade test kitchen for BOH trade tests and barista trade tests
- Running FOH onboarding and upskilling sessions
- Arranging external job/uni fairs with local institutions
- Checking the compliance, documents and approving new candidates
- Completing reference requests for staff
- Training new internal staff on our compliance and onboarding processes
- Collaborating with the business managers to ensure our onboarding standards are met.
- Overseeing my onboarding team!
3. How do you ensure that the new hires (internal & external) align with Evolve Hospitality’s culture and values during the onboarding process?
With new internal staff, I spend a week with them at the beginning of their time with Evolve to ensure they get full training on all of our internal processes in relation to compliance, onboarding sessions, standards and much more!
With our new agency workers that come in to the office for onboarding, we ensure that Evolve’s values are instilled from the beginning. The new candidates watch an induction video that goes into detail about Evolve, who we are, our values and expectations from them. We also make sure that during the onboarding process, everything is done on a personal level… We spend a considerable amount of time training new staff and giving them the best start into the agency. We onboard everyone in person and each new candidate will meet their consultant to build the personal rapport that Evolve are known for.
4. How do you tailor your training process for various positions with the hospitality industry?
We have designated FOH and BOH teams in the office, each with specific skills and experience. This means we can tailor the BOH onboarding with the help of our chef consultants, to create trade tests that all chefs go through to ensure they have the skills needed to meet our clients expectations. Our FOH onboarding is tailored to the skills they will need when attending shifts as waiters, baristas, Hospitality assistants and much more. Our FOH coordinator used to be a temp of ours, so has a huge amount of specific knowledge on FOH shifts, that we can pass on to our staff.
5. Could you share a particularly memorable or success story from one of your onboarding or training initiatives at Evolve Hospitality?
It’s always good to remember specific successes within the agency. But the most memorable would have to be our FOH training coordinator Gezim, starting with us as a temp, and working his way into the office as a resourcer, and now working as my FOH training coordinator! Such a great success story and shows the growth that is available within the company!
6. In a dynamic industry like hospitality, how do you stay updated with the latest trends and best practices in onboarding and training?
To keep up with the latest trends in the hospitality agency, we ensure the members of the onboarding team, and the consultants actively go out and work shifts for our existing and new clients. This gives them real-time experience and updates of changing processes and trends and also cements the relationships we have with our clients. Any new trends or processes can then be brought back into the office and we can amend our training accordingly. *use of tech in training sessions
7. How do you foster collaboration among different departments or teams within Evolve Hospitality to enhance the overall training experience?
I work really closely with the operations team at Evolve. This has been a huge help when collaborating with new media for our onboarding sessions, marketing and job ads across the company and creating standardised procedures across the group. I also work closely with the business managers and consultants, so we can constantly change/amend best practices and run new ideas through each other!
8. What indicators do you use to measure the success of your onboarding and training efforts?
There are a few indicators we use to gage the success of the training. The first one is candidate feedback… This is really important to inform us of what is working and landing in our training sessions and what could be improved. We also gain constant feedback from our clients regarding the standard of staff that we are sending out! This can help us pinpoint our strengths during training and anything that can be improved. I also keep track of the number of new staff that have been onboarded, compared to how many have picked up their first shift with us! Our aim is to ensure that everyone that comes in for onboarding, has all the confidence, skills and knowledge they need to start picking up shifts straight away!
9. How do you tailor the onboarding and training programs to meet the diverse needs of employees at different levels or with varying backgrounds?
We can tailor the sessions dependent on their skill levels….For example, is we have booked a group session in for FOH training, that are all looking to work as a hospitality assistant, we will tailor the training to more specific skills that a hospitality assistant will need. We also have different BOH trade tests for Kitchen Assistants, compared to Chefs. We also run upskilling sessions for FOH staff that are looking for additional support or that would like to learn a new skill, or just to build their confidence!
10. What do you love most about your job?
My favourite part of my job is by far meeting new people every day! It means that no day is ever the same and it keeps my love for hospitality alive! Getting up on my feet and training a group of staff is definitely more fulfilling than if I was at my desk all day! I also love the environment of the Evolve office….It’s such a fun group of people and a fantastic atmosphere to work in.
11th July 2024