By Alexandra Zendrian

At this year’s Society for Hospitality and Foodservice Management (SHFM) Critical Issues Conference, the focus was on bridging the gap between hospitality and technology. After all, as Harpreet Cheema, Senior Director of Digital Design and Development at Sodexo, noted, “By 2030, 75 percent of jobs will have a tech skill requirement.” In this industry in particular though, there’s a dichotomy because, as he points out, “we didn’t join this industry because we love working behind a laptop.” So how will the foodservice industry surpass whatever inherent gap it has with tech and learn to use tech that will be beneficial?

When people in the industry think about a tech gap, they need to embrace that people have various levels of tech literacy and literacy overall, said Alice Fournier, Chief Information Officer at ISS Americas.

Fournier suggests rather than putting someone without digital skills in a negative place before they even start work, such as a digital onboarding, to be cognizant of where each employee and potential staff member is at in their lives, which also includes neurodiversity.

“Automation drives fear because of the lack of knowledge,” said Rob Brummett, Director of Digital Strategic Accounts at Aramark Workplace Experience Group.

Other tips for making the tech experience more inclusive is not assuming that everyone’s default language is English, Cheema said. For him, ultimately, “success around digital is not to have to train employees on anything.” Therefore, if there’s a lot of training required, perhaps this isn’t the best solution.

But, if there is training involved, it can be helpful to have employees train other employees on the new tech, Brummett noted.

“There is untapped talent within the resources you have today,” said Elicia Young, Global Food Program Manager at Intuit.

And many of the day’s panelists agreed that the industry shouldn’t clamor for tech as the cure-all. The best approach to solving an issue is determining what the problem is and then assessing from the ground up what’s required to achieve the goal.

“Don’t focus on creating a technology idea; create an idea,” said Jungveer Randhawa, Chief Technology Officer at Compass. “You can wrap technology around that idea.”

When it comes to tech adoption, it’s important to get key stakeholders into the process “very, very early,” Fournier said.

When modernizing tech training, Brummett suggests using media platforms such as YouTube and having shorter sessions that better suit a person’s attention span. Gamification also makes the experience more enjoyable.

She suggested recording people interacting with the tech to see where people struggle and how it can be more accessible and inclusive. Cheema added that anything that you would ask a frontline worker to try, the leadership team should be experiencing first.

“Digital knowledge can be acquired by everyone,” Fournier said, adding that it’s all about the willingness to learn.

There are some, particularly those in Gen Z, who are digitally native already, said Ennis Olson, Global Insights and Innovation Lead at the Food Program at Google, which may be adding to the width of the tech gap. But the training and adoption of tech that even a few years ago when it came out wasn’t relevant isn’t helping foodservice employees trust that tech will be beneficial for them.

Throughout the conference, it was stated that nothing will replace the human touch so people in foodservice don’t need to head for the hills. But it is time to, at the very least, dip their toe into tech.

People within the foodservice industry create tasty, beautiful plates of food, noted Haroon Qureshi, Chief Executive Officer of omniXM. “You’re food people; you can do anything.”