Egg Harbor Café is a chain of 20 cafes across the United States, employing 800 employees who are primarily frontline workers. We spoke with Courtney Sinnott, Head of Training and Communications to hear about why she chose Bites and learn about her experience with the platform.
What was the problem you were trying to solve?
I think that following the pandemic, the expectation of employees about how we work and learn really changed, and that made us reconsider the role of our learning and development strategy.
Many employees prefer to communicate and learn remotely. They have the expectation that they can choose when to do certain things. We wanted to introduce an element of flexibility and convenience to our strategy so that employees have an L&D platform that really meets their needs.
We also wanted to create training content that was relevant for our employees’ day to day work (specifically videos of how to make various menu items).
How were you conducting training before?
We had an LMS in place which we would use for legally mandated compliance trainings and we used MS Teams for corporate training.
Were there any challenges associated with that system?
The biggest challenge was that there was no documentation of practical and process-oriented trainings. We just used worksheets or took the managers’ word that their staff had been adequately trained. It was really hard to make sure that everyone was receiving the same information.
The way you say something is really impactful and so we want to communicate with our employees in a way which meets the company’s purpose. That’s why unifying our messaging across branches was a top priority.
Were you considering any other platforms other than Bites?
We were considering outsourcing videography and photography of training content to external suppliers, but we were not looking at other training platforms.
What made you choose Bites?
I think it was just really similar to the platforms we were used to using in our day-to-day lives. It was as if TikTok and a corporate LMS had a baby! Very user friendly, and I thought that it was something we could pick up quickly and easily.
You get the best of both worlds: on one side you have all the educational features you need like quizzes and flashcards etc., but you also have the engaging content you’re used to seeing on TikTok or Instagram. We have lots of Gen-Z employees so I think training with short videos is a really good fit for them.
What features do you like the most?
I love the video editor. It’s great to be able to go into a store, shoot a video in 30 minutes or less and be done. I love the gifs to give the videos a bit of spice and fast and slow motion are also really useful if we’re trying to demonstrate how to do something.
What are you using Bites for?
Having an instructional bite for every item on the menu is a goal we want to accomplish. We want to have an A+ training program so that if we need to open a new store, we have all the bites we need to set that store and its team up for success.
Beyond this goal we’re using it to teach kitchen staff how to prepare menu items, in both English and Spanish. We also use it to introduce monthly specials across all our branches. We have a lot of requests from corporate about the trainings we should create with Bites: from payroll, to IT and compliance, there’s a lot in the pipeline.
“We’re loving it. The field has been really receptive”.
I would say the biggest impact is that Bites saves us a ton of time on training, but it also hugely benefits our culture.
We’re a family owned business and so it’s super important to us that our managers aren’t working 10-12 hour days. Using Bites saves our managers a ton of time by reducing the amount of face-to-face training they need to do and makes sure they can go home to their families at a reasonable hour. Instead, we just send the employees a bite and they can learn in their own time.
Culturally it’s been amazing as well. We now know that everyone is getting the same, high quality training and corporate message regardless of location. This way we can communicate with our employees in a way which meets the company’s purpose and puts its employees first.
