“Our team has embraced the opportunity to prioritize our employee training with a strong new focus on club culture and hospitality,” says Robin Shelton, CCM, PGA Master Professional, General Manager of Newport Beach (Calif.) Country Club. “We have created two new management-level positions, Training Manager and Assistant Director of Food & Beverage–Training, that have quickly had an impact and been well-received by both members and staff.”
By Robin Shelton • CCM, PGA Master Professional, General Manager of Newport Beach (Calif.) Country Club
“I am not telling you it will be easy. I will tell you it’s definitely going to be worth it.”
This quote has always been a ‘north star’ or guiding direction when asking our team members about big ideas or new and challenging concepts.
Our club had been facing a challenge that I think is common in our industry—the onboarding of new employees and ensuring they understand the club’s culture, performance standards, and measures of success. Too often, I found, we were ‘delegating’ training to anyone working the same shift.
I used a football analogy with our team—no team would just put eleven players on the field and tell them to ‘go play.’ The football team will have a playbook, huddle before plays, review video footage, discuss opportunities from the bench, and so on.
So the questions became: How do we improve our onboarding and new team-member training? How do we not just do what we’ve always done? How can we learn from other industries or sports?
New Positions for a New Approach
Our team has embraced the opportunity to prioritize our employee training with a strong new focus on club culture and hospitality. We have created two new management-level positions, Training Manager and Assistant Director of Food & Beverage–Training, that have quickly had an impact and been well-received by both members and staff.
Melanie Stacklie, a 20-year employee at our club, was promoted to the Training Manager position. Every new hire now completes an individual comprehensive orientation, including videos and situational training, with Melanie before he or she starts work. With this approach, all team members have, at minimum, two days of training before performing any duty.
Additionally, Melanie has been developing training programs for all team members and working with all departments to make continuous improvements through training and re-training.
The videos used in the orientation process are all hospitality-focused. They feature Danny Meyer, Bobby Stuckey and other prominent hoteliers and restauranteurs, on topics that include hospitality vs. service; team-member empowerment; making connections, and putting your people first. The videos are discussed before and after they are watched, and it has been interesting to see each person’s interpretation of them.
For the situational training, some fairly simple scenarios involving hospitality are used, with the goal of getting new hires focused on seeing opportunities to enhance the member experience. For example, one scenario involves a member asking for a Gatorade in an area where it is not served. Because we do serve it in another area, what would they do in that situation?
The objective of these exercises is not to try to stump or trick the new employee, but to help them realize that there are numerous times each day when they can make an improvement. We love it when they get every answer correct, and because the situational training comes at the end of the orientation, the great news is that most of the new hires do.
Melanie, who previously held an Accounting Manager position here, and has also served as our Interim Director of Spa & Recreation, has been excited about the opportunity to help create this brand-new program and to see how it can have such a huge impact on the entire club. Her decades-long knowledge of Newport Beach CC, and the relationships she’s built in her 20 years here, are proving to be an incredible asset for her in her new role.
To put a special emphasis on our food-and-beverage operation, we have also hired Karen So, who was previously General Manager of Henry’s Uncorked, a popular wine bar in nearby Huntington Beach, Calif., for our new position of Assistant Director of Food & Beverage—Training. In addition to her restaurant experience, Karen has her Level 3 from the Wine & Spirit Education Trust (WSET) and her 1st Level of The Court of Master Sommeliers. (Melanie Stacklie has also enhanced what she can develop and provide in her position by recently obtaining her WSET Level 2, with merit.)
In her new role, Karen works with all members of the food-and-beverage team to ensure they are expertly trained on products, menus, service standards and hospitality. And she has jumped right in, creating detailed menu guides, onboarding training schedules, menu-knowledge tests, one-on-one coaching, and standard operating procedures (SOPs) for our five different food-and-beverage outlets. (See links below.)
The detailed menu guides include photos of dishes and a detailed list of all of their ingredients, including what’s in any sauces that are part of the dish. The menu-knowledge tests ensure that team members know exactly what every dish is and what is in it, while the training schedules cover the details of every step of the training process, including where someone will be training, what to wear and exactly what they’ll learn.
The SOPs are formal written instructions for different processes. Because each document is so detailed and specific, it is easy for them to be custom-tailored to each outlet.
Proof That It’s Working
I am excited for what’s ahead in our future at Newport Beach Country Club. It has not been easy developing these programs. They have required a lot of time and energy, and as we all know, getting 25- and 30-year team members to see the value of training and re-training programs can be especially challenging,
But it has all quickly proved to be totally worth it—and timely as we strive to have members fully enjoy our new 65,000-sq. ft. clubhouse while also preparing to host The Hoag Classic for the PGA TOUR Champions in March of 2022.
In addition to the tangible measurements that we track of the program’s success—including the number of member referrals into the club; growth in covers and F&B spending, and a reduction in the number of items ‘comped’ for service recovery—we are already seeing great feedback from both club members and team members about this new focus on training and the creation of these training-focused management positions. Here’s just some of what we’ve heard:
– After two weeks of our focused training, a 34-year veteran on our staff who was very reluctant to go through it at the beginning said “I really see how this will be helpful for us, and especially for our other team members.”
– A team member who was promoted to a Lead Server and Floor Trainer said, “This will help get us all on the same page.”
– And perhaps best of all, a member said, “What a difference in food and service in the last six months. You and the team are to be complimented. We have to start telling more members how great the service and improvements are in Seahorse [our upstairs dining room].”
Click on the links below to view some of the guides and resources developed through Newport Beach CC’s new training initiative:
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