Mr. Flores

Food & Beverage

Training and Maintaining Your Service Staff

By Juan Carlos Flores, Executive Sommelier, Pueblo Bonito Hotels Resorts & Spas

We know that knowledge of special cuisine and wines is not easily acquired, but comes from the investment of time, study and money. How often we see the people we have spent months training in our restaurants or wine boutiques leave for other jobs, taking with them all they have learned from us. Here we will discuss not only motivation and incentives, but also the importance of making the small changes in our business that will encourage staff stay with us.

Understand Your Labor Pool

Having trained employees in various areas, I have seen an enormous difference between those in a cosmopolitan city where opportunities for work are relatively scarce and those in a growing new tourist-oriented locale where opportunities for work exceed the number of available employees.

It is certainly not a peace of cake to train personnel from cosmopolitan areas, but it is definitely easier. They have more competition for their jobs and don't want to lose them, so they pay more attention to any new information that can make them more skilled and improve their performance. We can teach them new things that will actualize them and create a continuous, successful training program.

This is more difficult to do in growing, tourism-driven areas. Why? Because as a general rule, people have come to these burgeoning new areas looking for opportunities to climb in the hierarchic pyramid and earn more money. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this. Actually, it is a wonderful idea to move and take new responsibilities in the same company or in a different one. There are always attractive opportunities in these growing new cities that keep people moving from one place to another, in "Rotation." When there is a large rotation factor, it is very difficult to train people and guarantee good service.

When I worked as a wine supplier, I used to visit every food and beverage manager and restaurant owner in the area and even help them train people with wine service and basic rules for pairing wine with food. It was great fun and everyone was happy with the results, especially because they had not had to pay for the training. This was an additional service I gave them just because they were my clients. Over time, these familiar faces that I saw in my courses were improving a lot in their wine knowledge and were asking for more information and about the possibility of visiting wine regions in their own and other countries. Some of these people had additional training sponsored by their companies, the owners of the restaurants or their bosses. In each case, the cost of the courses and trips was expensive, but not in every case did it achieve a positive result for the sponsor that paid for it.

Be Selective About Your Investment in Personnel

First of all, we know that there are not many schools for studying wine. We have even fewer schools with wine programs that can be taken in a few days between regular periods of work. Possibly most important is that there are no inexpensive schools for learning about wine. In my personal experience, I have been taking courses in different countries, and I have always found and shared wonderful experiences with people who have the same passion for this subject as I do. As a consequence, I obtained a great deal of information that could not be found in books. It is always very useful to invest in this kind of education if you are interested in learning and improving. However, if you choose to sponsor someone who works for you, be sure you are choosing the right person.

I found it very sad to find people in a classroom who were sponsored by their companies and weren't really interested in being there. On the one hand, you have the people who make every possible effort to obtain this opportunity, even paying their own way. They pay to fly from a different country, for expensive housing, car rental and possibly part or all of the cost of their food. On the other hand, you have the people who were sponsored, with everything paid, sometimes with additional extra benefits, and yet some of them yawn through their instruction at school. Which group do you think is likely to share what they learned with the rest of the people who work in the same team when they return home? Who do you think will be happy with you for giving them the opportunity to have this once-in-a-lifetime experience? Who is going to work hard for you with a constant smile and stay loyal for many years? In my opinion, selection of the right people in whom to invest time, money and energy is more than the 50 % of the future success of your training. I have learned and confirmed that over a period of years.

Training people allowed me to find very good hard workers in each different place. Their passion inspired me to form my own team of sommeliers, working in the same place and learning from one another. This was a goal I wanted to achieve, and I started working in a chain of hotels that gave me the opportunity to do that with all their different restaurants. In the beginning I thought that it would be easier, but the rotation factor, caused by many factors, was giving me a very hard time. The principal problem was that many of the people working for me were not the kind of people I was expecting to have. They did not care about wine, nor the gastronomical aspects of food, nor giving special attention to the clients. They just wanted to make money. The funny thing is that more you work with knowledge and love, the more you find money as a consequence. They did not understand that.

Additionally, some of the people I wanted to keep with me found other opportunities in bars and discos with fewer hours of work, a lot of money in tips, and a lot of partying. That was not helping with my plans. I was doing many training programs that I could sometimes not finish with the same complete team because the people I was teaching two months before were leaving and I was getting new ones who had no knowledge. So for them I needed to start the course from the beginning again at a different hour of the day. I began having several courses per day and less time to actually be in the restaurants. This was not working well because the trainees were just waiting to learn the theory and then leave. The knowledge was not staying within the company where I needed it in order to give more profit and better service.

Motivate and Appreciate

We needed to stop or at least decrease the rotation factor, and we succeeded. We started making different theory and practical tests with all of our waiters and captains. We studied the profiles of our best people and offered them new possibilities for earning more money. We started by offering some extra bonuses for the best sales during the month. The best employees started working more, while the bad ones were either quitting or studying more to be part of this new group with special possibilities. After this we began obtaining detailed information about each person's sales and showing everybody just their goals and the positive numbers in a very optimistic weekly meeting. Those with the best sales were happy, and the lowest in the list of sales wanted to be the best in the next reunion, so they started working more and better. We now have better waiters who are happy and motivated and some of them are now wine stewards in the restaurants with the new responsibility of helping their team. Sales are better and they are working hard to become sommeliers with greater possibilities of being restaurant managers with more money and prestige. Today they are taking courses in other countries; they are enjoying drinking and eating the best, and are happy with a new style of life.

There is a phrase that I think is the key for many good things. "Treat people the way you would love to be treated." After choosing your employees correctly, give them opportunities for growing and learning, and they will reward you with great results. You will confirm that what you have been investing in them is exactly that... an investment.

Juan Carlos Flores, executive sommelier with Pueblo Bonito Oceanfront Resorts and Spas, was named Mexico’s champion sommelier in 2004, and in 2005 won the Five Star Diamond Award for best North American sommelier. Mr. Flores was educated in Mexico, France and the United States and speaks fluent English, Spanish and French. As executive sommelier, he oversees the extensive wine collections of Pueblo Bonito’s seven resort hotels and numerous restaurants, provides pairing recommendations, and serves as wine advisor and instructor. Mr. Flores can be contacted at jflores@pueblobonito.com.mx Extended Bio...

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