Staff Training for Restaurants and Bars: Gaplessly Academy

Four core courses, ready on day one

Every venue starts with the same four courses, in the order a new starter should take them:

• Service essentials (5 lessons): the first 30 seconds; taking an order well; checking back and reading the room; when things go wrong; the goodbye.
• Floor fundamentals (5 lessons): how the floor works; before service; carrying and running food; working with the kitchen and the pass; closing your section.
• Safety basics (4 lessons): allergies and dietary needs; serving alcohol responsibly; food safety on the floor; staying safe on shift.
• Bar foundations (5 lessons): your station and tools; measuring and balance; shake, stir or build; ice and glassware; building a round and working clean.

A lesson takes a few minutes to read and ends with two to four questions. Get every question right and the lesson is done. Get one wrong and you retry only the questions you missed, so nobody sits through the whole thing again for one slip.

Drills from your own cocktails, tables and menu

The core courses teach the job. The drills teach your venue. Their questions come from what you have already set up in Gaplessly:

• Cocktails: the glass, the garnish, how a drink is made, which ingredient is missing from a build, and how much of what. Wrong answers are taken from your other drinks, so the choices look like things your bar pours.
• Tables: how many a table seats, which room and floor it is in, which table is lit up on your floor plan, and which table takes a party of six.
• Menu: your pre-order extras and experiences, such as what the set menu includes and what it costs.

Questions are made from your data as it stands. Add a house cocktail or move a table and it is in the next drill. Change a recipe and the progress on that drink starts over, because the old answer no longer holds.

The menu drill asks nothing about allergens. Gaplessly does not hold allergen data for your dishes, so it would only be guessing.

Write your own courses

Admins and managers can write courses for the things only your venue does: house rules, opening and closing, how you run a function. A venue course uses the same lesson and check format as the core ones, and once published it sits above them on everyone's Academy page.

Assign training and see who is done

Assign a course to everyone in a role, or to one person, with a due date. Someone who joins after a role assignment gets seven days from their first day, so a new starter is never late on day one.

• Team progress shows who has finished each course, who is part way through and who is late.
• Each person sees their own training on their home screen and in the notification bell.
• One reminder email goes out the day before a course is due, and again a day and a week after it is late. Each person can turn these off.

Taking lessons is open to everyone on the team. Seeing the team's progress, assigning courses and writing venue courses is for admins and managers.

Lessly and the free public library

Lessly, the assistant in your dashboard, can tell a team member what training they have due and quiz them from your drills in chat. A quiz in chat records nothing; the drill pages keep the score. Admins and managers can ask Lessly who is behind, and it can suggest an assignment for them to confirm.

The front-of-house guides in the free Gaplessly library are the same lessons your team reads in Academy, alongside cocktail recipes and bar technique guides anyone can open.