At Connecteam, we want your setup to be easy and successful. As customer success managers we took our experience from working with hundreds of food and beverage companies worldwide and created this step-by-step tutorial to get your company set up to PERFECTION.

You can expect this guide to go through all of the steps needed to get your account up and running with real-world examples of how each feature or capability can work for a Food and Beverage company your size. Like Connecteam, this guide works as an all-in-one solution to your HR & Skills Hub Set Up. While there are many other articles found here on our Help Center we have designed this guide, particularly for food and beverage companies of your kind and it should walk you through your complete setup step by step.

Don't worry! We’ve got all of the first steps to make your life easy and Connecteam work for you! 🤩

After reading this guide you should be able to start fully operating the platform you will learn how to:

💡Tip: Anytime you see blue text in this article it is a link or menu of links to other areas inside this guide. If you're looking for something specific, or you don't finish the setup in one day, you can always find what you need or pick up where you left off by clicking on the relevant topic.

Wait! Did you sign up for multiple hubs? Did you already receive a setup guide and know how to add users and create smart groups? Then click here to move on to the next section

The first steps when setting up your account are going to be adding your users and creating your smart groups. In this section we will walk you through:

Custom fields are information fields found inside the user's profile, and are filled with information specific to each employee. Custom fields are a smart way to identify and group your workforce, allowing you to customize what information is important to your company in order to organize its users. Examples of custom fields can be Position, Department, Birthday, Uniform Size, and much more.

We recommend planning out the information you want to know about your employees and creating these custom fields prior to adding the employees themselves. This will allow you to update all their information when adding them and save you tons of time later.

To Add a Custom Field: Head over to the user's tab, enter the employee's detail page then select Add Field and choose the type of field, name it, and press save.

In the example below you can see we created a custom field named position. In our company, the positions will be Supervisor, Server, Barista, Cook, etc. Another custom field can be the locations or branches the employee works at.

Please note that there are 3 default fields you will never be able to edit or delete; these are First Name, Last Name, and Mobile Phone.

💡A Customer Success Manager’s Tip: We recommend using the drop-down custom field type when creating your custom fields, which allows you to create a list of information to select from when filling out the custom field. This will simplify things later if using smart groups, which are filtered by custom fields. The filter of smart groups is case-sensitive, and here at Connecteam, we have encountered numerous companies whose users were not added to the proper smart groups because of typos made when filling out a user's custom field. Using a drop-down custom field avoids this possibility right from the start!

Once you have set up your custom fields it's time to move on to adding users. After all, that's what you came here for - managing your workforce.

To Add Users: Simply navigate your way to the Users Tab on the left - hand and click on it. Once inside select Add Users and fill in the requested details. You can also use the menu on the right side to add more details than the ones which appear here which are only the required fields. After filling out the details make sure the Send an invite button is selected in order to.

💡Tip: If you have many users, you can import them in bulk.

Smart groups are groups based on rules. All the users who meet the rule will automatically be added to the group and those who don't won't be added. It's as simple as that. A smart groups filter is based on custom fields - which we previously created.

In food and beverage companies, smart groups are hugely beneficial and allow you to create different teams with different qualifications for your staff. For example, you can group your staff by their ability to do specific jobs like- servers or cooks jobs. Since Connecteam's features, assets, courses, documents, chats and much more can be assigned to smart groups, grouping them now will help us later on with things like scheduling correctly (and much more).

Step 1: Navigate to the smart group's category on the left sidebar

Step 2: First, add a Segment

Step 3: Use the + Add a group button from inside the Segment to create a group and then name the group.

Step 4: Set the Filter. First, choose the Custom field, and then finally select or enter the criteria that the group will be defined by.

In the example below you can see how I create a group of only my staff who are qualified as cooks.

Now that you know the basics of setting up your account it's time to move on to the features related to the Hr

This hub consists of 7 features, but for food and beverage companies we find the Courses & quizzes, and Documents to be most beneficial. Below we will go over how to set up and utilize each feature that we find most valuable for big-sized food and beverage companies use.

Courses are an easy way to create and deliver a digital type of training or process for your team to perform from anywhere and at any time. These can be onboarding new employees, training for new roles, and any other needs you can think of.

F&B companies using Connecteam find onboarding courses and position training very useful, and utilize Courses regularly, especially when adding new members to the team happens frequently.

In this section, we will go on how to use all the objects in the Connecteam courses feature and the steps you should take in order to create an effective onboarding. This article will use the example of creating an onboarding course for servers in a restaurant, but the principles discussed here can be applied to any other course you wish to create 🤩 Now let’s get started!

Here is what we will cover next:

Before we begin we will give you a quick overview of how using courses looks for your employees!

When you assign a new Course to your employees, depending on your publishing decisions, the Connecteam App will present the new course under the courses asset and in the general feed, accompanied by notifications so no one will miss it!

In the example below, you will be able to see how simple and easy it is for your employees to start their course, communicate their progress and understanding, and for you to track and feedback on their training!

The most important part of creating any kind of course, especially an onboarding for new employees to your F&B business is the process of planning. This happens prior to creating the courses in the Connecteam platform and involves deciding what information you want to include in your course. The next step is to decide the format you want to convey this information to your new team members. Whether it is through text, videos, quizzes, or forms employees need them to fill out, etc. Connecteam gives you all the options.

Below you can see that prior to creating the course we created a list of the information we want to include in the Waiters' onboarding and the format this information is in.

Once you are done planning it is time to create the course itself. To get started enter your courses feature on the left sidebar, then select + add new and name the course. In the example below you can see we named the Course Onboarding for Waiters. Now simply add sections and objects.

After creating a course, you will need to add sections and objects inside those sections. The purpose of sections is to divide your course into categories. If your course contains different topics such as menu, responsibilities, or customer service, then using sections will separate these topics into categories and keep information organized.

Objects are the material you will include in your course. For example, these can be documents, videos, quizzes, forms, and much more! Take a look below at all the options for objects Connecteam offers when creating a course.

To add an object simply select the + add object button and select the object type. Then take the relevant steps to finish adding the object. Below we will give you 2 Examples of how objects can look when using courses for F&B companies. Be sure to try out the rest of the objects on your own!

Below you can see we used the text message to create a welcome message for all the waiters beginning this onboarding.

When it's all said and done, as a manager we need to measure how the users did in the onboarding, so we created a quiz for the users to take when finishing the course.

The quiz can be customized to include text answers or images. You can even adjust the quiz settings to include a passing score, randomize the question order, and much more.

A Real World Example: As high turnover in service employees could be a big challenge for Food & Beverage companies, the company above used Connecteam to design an onboarding course, to have the new employees acknowledge the company’s policies and standards, and also provide service and menu training so every new onboard will be aligned.

Once you have finished designing your course you can save it as a draft, or publish it and assign it to users. To publish select save changes, and assign it to either select users or smart groups. That's it your course is ready to go 🤩

A Real-World Example: Throughout this guide, we shared with you real examples from food and beverage companies using Connecteam Courses in a way that is specific to your industry. Besides onboarding, there are many more additional courses that are important and useful for the F&B industry - Implementing new policies and standards, Wine training, New dishes on the menu, using and maintaining specific tools and machinery in the kitchen, Qualification course (e.g. shift managers) and so much more!

Connecteam’s Document feature lets your employees upload documents directly through the app. Whether it's a Federal W-4 form or a new employee hire form all the documents pertaining to your entire company can be found directly in the Documents tab. No more searching file folders to find that one document.

Have all required certificates and licenses for your F&B business in one place! TIPS, work permits, and other HR documents. Start using the documents feature now!

Here is what we will cover next:

Before we begin we will give you a quick overview of how using documents will look for your employees!

When assigning a new Document to your employees, they will be able to find it under the Profile Tab, in the Employee documents section. There they will find all the required documents requested from them, as well as the status of each submission, and of course, upload new documents to the platform!

In the example below, you can see exactly how this looks for your employees, how to access the employee documents section, and how easy it is to upload new documents for you to review:

The document feature can be found in your left sidebar. To begin, enter the feature, and click on create a pack. This will bring you to the document settings, where you will begin setting up your document packs and adding documents.

Document packs are groups of documents. An easy way to think of them are as folders, each one for a different set of documents. These can be assigned either to individual users or to smart groups - based on position, branch, or more. You can add as many document packs as you like each containing the same or different documents.

To add a new document pack, click on the Add a New Document Packet, name the packet, select and add the relevant documents, assign it to the relevant users or smart group, and then save changes.

You can create a specific document pack. Food and Beverage companies for example like to add a bartender's pack with their TIPS and criminal records documents.

Now that you have created a document pack let's add documents to it!

In order to add documents to the pack, you first need to create documents and add them to the document list. Below we will go over how to do this.

In the example below you can see that after adding more documents to the documents list we added Documents to the HR personnel Document Pack

💡A Customer Success Manager's Tip: Adding more document packs can be done exactly how you did it when adding the document pack and documents above. Note that each pack can be assigned to its own smart group or users, have its own admins, and can contain different documents.

Expiration dates are found inside the setting of an individual document. They are specific to that document. To access these enter the Document feature, go to the document settings in the top right corner, and navigate to a specific document's settings.

At the bottom, you will see the option to set an expiration date. You can check this off to enable it.

After enabling the expiration date it's time to decide which kind of date you want to set the options are either per a document or per an entry. Below we will go over both options.

This option sets the expiration date to be per a document, meaning that regardless of when a user uploaded a document. Once the expiration date arrives all documents uploaded will need to be uploaded again. This option could be great for example, when you, as the owner, want to add your yearly business licenses, such as a Liquor License.

In this capability, you also have the ability to set the frequency at which documents expire. These are every two weeks, every month, and yearly.

Expiration dates per entry are dates that are septic to a specific submission. These are not set by you (the admin) they are set by the user or admin when uploading the document. This option could be great for example, if you have users uploading documents that expire on different dates, such as a TIPS certificate.

Let's take a look at how using these options looks from the user’s perspective. In the example below you can see that when uploading my license, I have to set an expiration date.

💡A Customer Success Managers Tip: If you set your expiration date to be per a document: Then within one week of the expiration date set you will see a countdown at the top of the document panel.

A Real World Example: A restaurant from Santa Cruz, California, was looking for a way to track employees' annual documents, including TIPS, as well as the restaurant's Liqueur License. Using Connecteam's documents, the manager created a separate pack assigned only to them for the restaurant licenses, and a separate employee pack to support their relevant certificates! In addition, the expiry date always reminds the team what has to be renewed, to avoid any room for mistakes :)

Connecteam’s Rewards feature is designed to serve as a tool for managers that want to incentivize and motivate their kitchen and floor employees, the rewards feature is an amazing way to show appreciation to your team in the form of tokens, which can be used to purchase gift cards. Let's get started on the basics of this amazing feature!

In this section we will go over the following:

Tokens are a digital form of money that users receive when you reward them.

Your kitchen and floor employees can use tokens to buy gift cards at a variety of places, like coffee shops or restaurants. They can be purchased on the Connecteam platform, making it easy for you to ensure you always have enough tokens when needed.

To buy tokens simply press the purchase tokens button and select the relevant bundle.

To send tokens follow these steps:

Viola, you have rewarded your hard-working Cook!

In the card library, you can decide exactly which gift cards users can purchase with their tokens.

If you are a large company this allows admins and owners to ensure users are not purchasing gift cards from your competitors.

To set your desired cards enter the card library and toggle on the country you are in and all the vendors which offer gift cards will appear.

Here you can toggle on or the cards which will be available to users.

A Real World Example: Once the restaurant we work with in California used the Rewards feature to show appreciation for their employees who pick up shifts on holidays rather than being at home with their families.

In the Food & Beverage industry, retaining your employees is crucial!

Employee turnover costs a company both time and money. Research shows that companies that engage positively with their kitchen and floor teams and recognize employee accomplishments have lower turnover rates. For this reason, using the recognition feature to acknowledge your employees' accomplishments, celebrate wins, and promote company values is so crucial!

In this section we will go over the following:

The first step to empowering your workforce is to activate the recognition feature. Navigate to the left sidebar, select recognitions, and press activate. It's as simple as that.

Sending a recognition is super easy! Simply follow these steps:

While we offer you tons of badges to choose from, we also know that sometimes you may want to create a custom badge that better fits your company's needs. To create a custom badge simply enter the Badge Library, select create a badge, pick your icon, name your badge and choose the topic. In the example below you can see I created the ‘Waiter of the month’ for a monthly recognition.

A Real-World Example: One restaurant we worked with created a custom badge called Waiter of the Month, just as the example above shows!

They used this recognition to recognize employees who go above and beyond each month. It was a great way to boost morale by regularly awarding this badge to a deserving employee each month. It also gives your users a healthy dose of competition that will only incentivize them to work a little harder.

In this article, we went over everything you would need as a food and beverage company to get connectome's Hr & Skills hub set up and customized to meet your company's needs. While setting up and adapting to a new system might bring challenges and periods of adjustment for you and your employees here at Connecteam we are always here to help.

You can always reach out to our LIVE support team 🙋 (at the bottom right corner of your screen). They reply in under 5 mins to ANY question!