Experience exchange could be a real boost to training

I have got an idea and I'm quite excited about it. If, once you've read this, you think it is a good idea, I would like to hear from you. This is how it came about.

Just before Christmas, one of my colleagues dropped into a restaurant for lunch. A member of the waiting team greeted her and showed her to a table, leaving her to study the menu. That took a couple of minutes.

The wait for service took upwards of five minutes, she told me, with lots of hopeful looks in the direction of a gaggle of team members standing and chatting at the reception desk. She finally caught their eye and her order was taken.

While she was waiting for her meal to arrive, she noticed that the head was broken on the fresh carnation in the vase on her table. It dropped off when she touched it, leaving just the stem and leaves.

Also, the top was coming off the salt cellar because the nut was missing and, although the table was laid for two, neither place setting included a knife.

She phoned me to tell me about the experience. Why? Because it was one of our restaurants, and if there are three things that we pride ourselves on, they are good service, good housekeeping and honest feedback.

Of course, there were mitigating factors. It was the Christmas rush; the team was new - but all the same, I was deeply disappointed to know that we were letting guests down.

Over the Christmas and New Year break, I thought a lot about the incident and wondered what we could do about it. If you run your own business, you must have experienced similar feelings of frustration.

Our management team can't be everywhere all the time. In any case, we believe every team member worth their salt should have an equal commitment to the standards we set. We have independent housekeeping auditors and mystery-diner programmes to help our managers identify weak points and put them right. But this case proved that the system can still fail us.

That's when it hit me.

We all know that the best way to learn is by experience. The best training for our teams would be for them to visit other restaurants, bars and clubs as guests, and discover for themselves the difference between a good experience and a bad experience.

Our managers are pretty good at keeping in touch with the competition and making unofficial visits to other venues in town. Unfortunately, this isn't always the case with kitchen, bar and restaurant team members.

You might start with the best intentions, but it's a costly business making the time for people to do it and paying their expense bill at the end of the evening.

Yet this would be a most powerful training exercise, if it were managed properly. We would need a facilitator to explain to our group of "industrial tourists" what to look out for and to formalise their feedback so it could be shared with other team members. This would be an added cost.

At this point, I was prepared to throw in the towel. It had all become too difficult and I couldn't handle the logistics. Then it dawned on me: we have a number of industry bodies that promote training. If I could get one of them involved to manage the process, I would have the technical side covered.

That still left the cost. Well, OK, if I could swallow the cost and inconvenience of, say, four team members being out of one of our bars for a night every couple of months, was there a way of offsetting the potential food, drink and travel bill? It would be about £25,000 a year across our total business.

That's when the big idea hit me. No, of course none of us wants to face that kind of bill, and yet all of us would like the benefits of well-informed teams who know what is going on in the marketplace and have identified for themselves the elements of best practice.

So why don't we set up an experience exchange? It would be a kind of barter system for training. I would "buy" £25,000-worth of tokens, and others would buy tokens to match their requirements. Our teams would use up the tokens to pay for their visits.

I realise there are all sorts of issues about taxable benefits, ensuring that the token system is fair, recruiting enough players - but I think there is the germ of an idea here and I would like to get your feedback as employers and team members.

If there is enough support for the general principle, I am happy to set the ball rolling by talking to training providers and getting a team together to work on the logistics.

Stephen Evans (left) is chief executive of Mustard Entertainment Restaurants, non-executive director of Dineline, chairman of First! Venues and a member of the Restaurant Association national committee. He can be reached on e-mail at stephen.evans@mustard74.fsnet.co.ukor at Mustard Entertainment Restaurants, 200 Broad Street, Birmingham B15 1AY