The restaurant industry has always struggled with high levels of employee turnover. And especially since the onset of labor disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the need to employ and train new and temporary workers has escalated to record-breaking levels. For example, in 2022, only 54% of QSR employees worked for 90 days before quitting.
Some economic forecasters predict that labor deficiencies in the restaurant industry may be a permanent condition. All the more reason that restaurant leaders must find innovative solutions to maintain efficiencies given less staff with less experience. In the absence of manpower, IoT connectivity combined with automated digital decision-making tools generate real-time insights and prescriptive actions that restaurant managers, operations executives, and food safety professionals can leverage to empower employees.
Expecting employees to do more with less while delivering the same customer experience is unrealistic — unless, that is, they are supported by automated employee guidance. How does this work?
Using a network of digital sensors, IoT Sensing-as-a-Service solutions produce a vast range of telemetry data, such as temperature, humidity, traffic, and volume, that can be automatically delivered as text-based prescriptive insights that prompt employees to perform specific tasks and confirm those tasks were completed.
Automated guidance can be leveraged to enhance employee training, reduce monotonous tasks, maintain food safety and quality, streamline compliance protocols, and ultimately, boost both employee and customer satisfaction and loyalty.
An increasingly inexperienced workforce requires precise training procedures to ensure staff meet customer expectations and follow the specific SOPs of the restaurant brand. In a labor gap where employees must make every moment of their shift count, they have little time to look up and read about correct procedures in a printed manual.
Instead, they need on-demand training digitally integrated into the tools they’re using and aligned with the flow of food, from receiving ingredients at the loading dock to delivering a high-quality product to customers at their table, over the counter, or at their home. For restaurants hiring a significant percentage of short-term employees, processes and standards must be built into operations to reduce the margin of error and enable seamless staff turnover.
One reason restaurant employees tire of their roles is a daily routine that includes too many tasks they find boring and unfulfilling. AI and IoT effectively reduce monotonous tasks in frontline jobs by automating repetitive and time-consuming work, thus freeing employees to focus on more creative challenges.
Gen Z employees, in particular, don’t just prefer to leverage technology to make their jobs easier—they expect it. As consumers, this generation is accustomed to using connected technology that automates tasks and provides on-demand information. For example, ridesharing and food delivery apps tell them exactly where their driver is at all moments along the journey. This familiarity with connected technology in their personal lives creates an expectation that they’ll be provided the same kind of advanced technology at work.
Challenges with inexperienced workers and low staffing levels should not put the safety and satisfaction of customers at risk. On-demand training and guidance built into the devices and equipment that employees use increases adherence to food safety and quality standards and mitigates risk exposure for restaurant brands.
Given frequent and often unexpected supply chain disruptions, the pressure is on to maintain high levels of food safety for customers to keep them returning. All it takes is a single spoiled product causing an outbreak of foodborne illness and bad publicity to put both customer health and brand reputation in jeopardy.
The current food regulatory environment is exceedingly complex. Federal compliance standards are continuously evolving. Just recently, the FDA released a new set of food traceability regulations as part of the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA).
The ever-changing nature of compliance requires that restaurant managers ensure their employees are up to date on the latest rules and guidelines. In addition to being acquainted with compliance standards, employees must also produce on-time and accurate reports proving that products were stored in adherence to federal and state regulations. Because manual compliance duties are often squeezed into already hectic schedules and sometimes overlooked because of lack of time, monitoring measurements and records are often inaccurate or missing altogether.
An integrated Sensing-as-a-Service framework removes the need for manual reporting. IoT cellular gateways automate the transfer of environmental recording data to an interconnected dashboard, which then translates telemetry insights into a simplified compliance log. Within seconds, a workflow that would take employees hours to perform is already completed, thereby opening wider time windows to focus on maximizing the customer experience without experiencing burnout.
Sensing-as-a-Service provides restaurant store managers with a proactive method to mitigate the impact of industry labor shortages, thus ensuring they have adequate staff levels to keep operations running smoothly. Compounded at scale, this framework leads to a more productive and engaged staff committed to working for the restaurant long-term.
The present realities of the labor market should encourage restaurant executives and operations leaders to find new ways to revamp labor management through increased automation that leads to labor savings, employee productivity, and customer satisfaction. Operators must respond to the shifting labor environment and navigate the digitalization process before losses in efficiency unnecessarily start eating into profits. It’s the next logical and inevitable step — in fact, digital food management solutions are expected to reach $2.4 billion in valuation by 2026.
DIG is an excellent example of a fast-casual restaurant chain that has found great success with automated processes after implementing our Sensing-as-a-Service solution. Before SmartSense, DIG’s food safety processes were time-intensive and monotonous, requiring employees to record temperature readings manually on paper before uploading the reports online.
In this video, Amber Villegas, Chef & Field Trainer at DIG, talks about how the SmartSense platform allows DIG’s cooling assets to be monitored continuously and how temperature readings are automatically recorded and stored in the cloud. This framework has created a new climate of accountability. Employees are now empowered to take the correct actions to ensure safety compliance while delivering fresh, healthy meals to happy customers — all the while saving precious labor hours for other high-priority tasks.