Flight Club x Attensi: It’s a bullseye
Flight Club, renowned for its social dart experience, enhances employee training with Attensi PORTAL and Attensi SKILLS.
Flight Club, renowned for its social dart experience, enhances employee training with Attensi PORTAL and Attensi SKILLS.
The home of ‘social darts’, Flight Club brings its guests together for an innovative, highly social experience. It’s safe to say this isn’t your typical restaurant. And a unique set of venues need training to match.
With a mission of creating a premium experience through gaming as well as exceptional customer service, it seemed only natural that Flight Club should gel with Attensi when it came to deciding their next training provider.
We caught up with Jeff Ashton (Director of Operations), Amanda Cibotti (Director of Training and Development), Patrick Crow (Regional Manager) and one of their team members, Carlos DaSilva Jr., to find out more about their collaboration with Attensi.
Jeff tells us that historically, finding the right training at Flight Club has felt a bit like fitting a square peg in a round hole. Because of the highly interactive and social nature of Flight Club, traditional restaurant training just didn’t quite hit the mark. Their offering goes way beyond typical table service, and training needed to reflect this.
“We killed all of the trees. We were not eco friendly at all,” says Amanda Cibotti. Before Attensi, the team at Flight Club learnt the old fashioned way – a lot of paper, binders and computerized training.
“It’s very difficult to inspire ‘aha’ moments on a piece of paper. It just doesn’t work.”
Amanda CibottiDirector of Training and Development | Flight Club
As someone on the front line of the team, Carlos DaSilva Jr., explains that this made memorizing and retaining the information challenging, especially when menus and offerings would change. When you’re juggling multiple reservations and customers, you don’t want anything to knock your confidence. Training needs to be easily digested and retained to empower employees.
Our employees are literally everything to us.
Regional Manger, Patrick Crow shares that one of his biggest challenges is ensuring that training is not only completed, but that the information is also retained.
“It was with these challenges in mind that the Attensi team set about creating training for the Flight Club that would be right on target.”
Jeff Ashton
Director or Operations | Flight Club
We knew that the team at Flight Club needed training that was as fun, creative and innovative as their team and their locations. Other criteria we needed to consider was the international nature of their team.
Amanda explains that she wanted to ensure that this training was as inclusive and accessible as possible to minimize any knowledge gaps. The team wanted to make sure that both front and back of house were on equal footing when it came to their buy in, confidence and knowledge.
Patrick tells us that this version of Flight Club SKILLS is just the beginning. Currently, all the written material is still accessible, and supported by a range of mini-games and activities. He anticipates that their Attensi training will soon cross over to reception, culinary and management.
“There’s no other training that I can think of that you could get someone to do more than once.”
Patrick Crow
Regional Manager | Flight Club
The competitive nature of these games have meant team members are already excited about what they’ve learnt before they’ve ever got in front of the customer. For Patrick, this ticks the engagement and retention boxes.
The thought of designing a fully fledged video game can be pretty daunting at first. However, Amanda tells us that actually, it was very self explanatory, even if she was a little nervous to mess with what the Attensi team had created.
And if she got stuck, she had the Attensi team and Attensi University right there by her side.
A shared love of making experiences fun and social really brought the Flight Club and Attensi teams together. Innovative, technology driven gaming are at the heart of each organization. It seemed like the natural choice.
According to Amanda, any one of the Attensi team could probably work at Flight Club – their knowledge and understanding of the brand and the organization was so in depth.
“Attensi is going to be what training is in the future of all industries.”
Where it was predicted each team member mightpay through the modules 2-3 times, the team outdid themselves. The average play through rate was almost 9 times per person.
For Patrick and Amanda, this is a fantastic result.
“If you want to be a leader in hospitality, I think they [Attensi] might be the best in the market.”
…which is a pretty fantastic result for us, too.