CindyHeilman
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May 25, 2010, 10:37 AM
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Changing from the Inside Out with Best Dining Practices
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By Cindy Heilman, MS, DTR
In May, I spoke at The Aging Services of California’s annual conference in Long Beach, which featured the theme: Communities: Inside Out. Participants were challenged to rethink their notion of community and be open to let go of the past and envision how future community models could be restructured from the inside out to better serve the diversity, lifestyles and personal needs of aging residents.
Communities: Inside Out resonates with me as I believe the key to restructuring for the future begins now, by optimizing the dining experience for residents through educating and training dining servers.
When we rethink how vital their role is to business success; it becomes easy to commit to nurture, train, and change behaviors from the inside out.
This leads me to my second best practice for dining success. (See The Secret to Success with Best Dining Practices for details about Number One)
Number Two. Servers emanate a courteous and professional demeanor at all times and all residents receive the same level of service no matter their ability to communicate.
What does this look like? Each mealtime, your servers proudly take ownership; ensuring each resident or guest is having the best meal experience your community offers. Servers serve on time, dress appropriately, and know the menu. They are smiling, making eye contact, addressing residents and each other pleasantly. Conversation and social interaction is comfortable. Servers exude confidence in working together, in the food served, and each does their part to ensure mealtimes are exceptional representational moments of your company. These actions consistently take place, no matter the level of care, or dining style, or differing abilities, age, or cultural background of the servers or their diners.
How can these service outcomes be accomplished? Through our intentional focus on server education, respect, and trust.
Education: It’s easy to think service training is taking place in another department, or that staff instinctively knows how to treat residents with common good manners, good sense, good hygiene and good serving techniques.
Its time to intentionally train all servers how to;
. Optimize residents’ dining experience.
. Be respectful, courteous, friendly, and smart in the dining room.
. Understand the changing senior marketplace, senior service. expectations, and how this is changing their role.
Leave behind the old notion of tolerating 70 to 100% turnover in care giving staff. It’s an expense that cannot be justified. Care giving staff who serve meals are often frustrated and choose to leave because of poor relationships with supervisors, lack of interpersonal and communication skills, and limited training that prepares them for the real-life aspects of their work, i.e. serving meals.
Risk proving it is more cost effective to educate than terminate. Trust your servers’ to appreciate learning new skills. Watch as they grasp the benefits (Learn how educating your staff pays! Check out my website www.HigherStandards.org)
Below are examples of knowledge, skills and attitudes, (KSAs) I deem invaluable for servers to understand in order to emanate a courteous and professional demeanor. Demonstrating consistency in service quality in each dining room and for each resident is a true measure of success.
Respect: “I really like how this [Kind Dining] training is formatted toward the servers. We often forget they are the ones who can make a difference simply by their approach, skills, and knowledge.”
This quote is from Lisa Maynard, Assisted Living Executive Director of Springs at Clackamas Woods. What I enjoy about Lisa is her respect for staff. Her appreciation and empathy grew after becoming a Kind Dining® trainer. Her staff gained new respect for her knowledge of serving and training techniques and ability to help them. What developed is a new level of caring in their relationship.
Let me illustrate this with a story: Over the last year, Lisa trained her staff in the Kind Dining® program. Last week, her servers in the independent dining room were brain-storming on a new title for their position. Through the discussion they thought of a way to spark more conversation and share more of their own personalities with residents. Since name tags are worn every meal, they would create personal taglines to go under their names. For example; Gabe is a sports fan and follows Oregon State University’s athletes; the Beavers. He is also an avid Portland Trail Blazer’s basketball fan. He chose his tagline: Go Beavers, Go Blazers!
Lisa delights in telling this story. She is proud of her servers who as a result of training continue to take initiatives to improve relationships and service.
She fully understands their job, its challenges, when they are doing a good job and not. She has gained confidence in overseeing the dining room and problem solving issues and concerns.
Her staff appreciates her new perspective, and interest in them. They look better, sport more interaction with residents, each other, and have become smarter about their job. They participate in team “challenges” to get even better. Outcomes: improved service results, and a new element of trust.
Trust: In his book; Speed of Trust, Stephen M.R. Covey writes: Trust is a function of two things: Character and competencies. Character includes your integrity, your motive, your intent with people. Competence includes your capabilities, your skills, your results, and your track record. He argues both are vital to a trustful relationship and building a high trust environment is the quickest way to build successful caring relationships and for a company to reach its full potential.
He sites several references which validates the strong connection between concern for others and performance, and shows how caring behavior and compassion for others can be translated into specific behaviors that constitute a better way of doing business.
I believe as the senior marketplace reinvents a new vision and models of senior community living we need to care more about developing the character and competency skills of staff who interact so closely and care for our residents. Developing our communities from the inside out will take service levels higher and communities and their staff will reach their full-potential.
Cindy Heilman, MS, DTR, is the CEO of Higher Standards, an Oregon-based hospitality company. Born from her vision to transform residential meal priorities and dining for senior residents, Cindy has created her experiential training program Kind Dining ®.
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(This post was edited by CindyHeilman on Jun 2, 2010, 1:08 PM)
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