When Eat’n Park says it’s a place for smiles, they mean not only customers but team members too.

The popular restaurant and hospitality group has a history of promotion from within the company. Among Eat’n Park senior management, stories abound of careers that started out behind the grill or taking orders at the table.

Robert Morris made it engaging, made it fun, made it enjoyable, and made it easy to learn. I think it says a lot about how engaged people were that every single individual who started the program graduated from it.

Jeff Broadhurst, President and CEO, Eat’n Park Hospitality Group

To keep that tradition going, Eat’n Park recently became part of an Aspen Institute initiative called “Reinventing Retail.”  Picked by the Allegheny Conference on Community Development to do a pilot project training frontline and hourly workers, Eat’n Park worked with RMU faculty to develop a course highlighting key customer service skills.

RMU faculty and Eat’n Park leaders collaborated on a 9-week program, where 10 high-performing employees attended one on-campus meeting with the professor followed by eight weeks of online instruction. The program culminated in a graduation ceremony for the participants, their supervisors, and family and friends.

At the graduation ceremony, it was so exciting to see all of our team members who went through this course bring not only their supervisor but a loved one — a spouse, a parent, a friend — to come and support them.

Mercy Senchur, Chief Operating Officer, Eat’n Park Hospitality Group

Highlights

• online learning modules
• on-campus orientation
• customer service focus
• graduation ceremony

The Eat’n pilot program with RMU demonstrates how online learning modules can enlarge a qualified labor pool and diversify talent while also helping service workers increase their ability to take on roles of higher responsibility.

Seeing Eat’n Park and Robert Morris come together has been really great because they’re the two organizations that have really been critical to my personal and professional growth.

Erin Stoughton, Director of Guest Engagement and Insight, Eat’n Park