You can do everything in this course and still not know whether it is working, because training is easy to feel good about and hard to see. Everyone believes they train their people. This last topic is about the few honest checks that tell you whether you actually do — a couple of numbers, a rhythm of short conversations, and the one moment where a person decides to stay or go and you get a chance to catch it.
⏳ Time to productive
The single most useful training number is how long it takes a new hire to work a shift alone, at your standard, with nobody covering for them. Call it time to productive. You do not need software to track it; you need to write down the date someone started and the date they first ran a station on their own, and do the subtraction.
The number is worth almost nothing on its own and a lot in comparison. Watch it two ways:
| Comparison | What a gap tells you |
| This hire against your last few, same role | A much longer time is a signal — the person, or the way they were trained, or who trained them |
| Your restaurant against itself over time | If it is getting shorter, your written procedures and your trainers are working. If it creeps up, something slipped |
| One trainer's hires against another's | Consistently faster people under one trainer is worth knowing — that is who should train, and who should be taught to |
Do not turn it into a stick. A long time to productive is a question, not a verdict — sometimes it is the hire, and just as often it is a station with no written guide or a trainer who was too busy to teach.
🗣️ The 30, 60, 90 day check-in
Most restaurants have exactly one structured conversation with an employee: the one where something has gone wrong. The fix is cheap and almost nobody does it — a short, deliberate sit-down at roughly thirty, sixty and ninety days, before there is a problem.
- Around thirty days. Is the job what they expected? What is still confusing? What do they need that they do not have? This is where you catch the early leaver while they are still catchable.
- Around sixty days. What do they feel solid on, what still shaky? What would they like to learn next? Now cross-training has a direction that came from them.
- Around ninety days. Where is this going? What is the next station, the next responsibility? A person who can see a next step is a person deciding to stay.
None of these takes long, and the direction that matters most is the one where you listen. The person three weeks in can see things about your onboarding that you cannot, because you have not been new here in years.
🔎 Check the work, not just the clock
Speed to productive says how fast; it does not say how good. A cook who is fast and wrong is not trained, they are just quick. So put a light, regular check on the actual work against the standard you wrote down in topic 4: a plate compared to its recipe card, a station inspected against its guide, a close checked the morning after. The point is not to police — it is to catch a task drifting away from the standard while the drift is one conversation, not a habit the whole team has quietly adopted. When you find drift, the answer usually points back into this course: the procedure was unclear, the training skipped a step, or nobody ever really showed them. The check tells you which.
🧭 What you have built
Put the six topics together and you have a system, not a set of good intentions. You decided the first days would have a shape (topic 1) and got everything ready before the shift so they did (topic 2). You taught tasks so they held instead of needing reteaching (topic 3) and wrote them down once so the knowledge stopped living in one head (topic 4). You built depth so an absence is not a crisis and people have room to grow (topic 5), and now you check whether it is working with a number, a rhythm of conversations, and an eye on the actual work (topic 6). Hiring will always be half the job. This course was the other half: that the people you hire stay, and do the work well.