Do Your Food Servers Meet Residents’ Expectations?

Autumn turns a chef’s ideas to serving comforting foods to your community residents gathering around the traditional table of warmth and congeniality. It’s a time for coming in out of the cold, looking forward to sharing a meal and conversation that warms your heart and your tummy. It’s a special time to bring new and long-time friends together where residents may find brilliantly colored leaves, pumpkins and apples on the table. A time when seeing their table companions creates a feeling warmer than knee-high socks and furry boots.

Hospitality in the autumn has a different aura than any other time of year. It is a great time for your food servers to exercise their teamwork, extending a helping hand naturally the way I teach through Kind Dining® transformational training.

Allow your food servers to invest in your community by their offering suggestions for improvements. Open the door to staff discussions. When your food servers, which include those often unseen in the kitchen, accept responsibility for their work, their self-image rises and they will come to love the work they do. Seemingly small things like restocking the pantry or passing along any particular note of information to the oncoming shift will come as another part of their day. This awareness of higher standards of the work day will overflow to the residents in a positive way. Happy residents mean a happy community which means a happy company. It’s an ‘everybody wins’ situation.

Culture change and personalizing service in the dining room builds trust between food servers and residents. Training sessions with Kind Dining® will show your food servers how to easily please residents whose expectations were to receive good service when they chose your community. Well-trained food servers are your company’s best marketing asset.

Our B Kind ® Tip: Remember, the service you give has the power to build community

About Cindy Heilman

Cindy is the founder and owner of Kind Dining®, which she began in 2006. She’s traveled across the country and Canada working with and training senior living communities that want to create an exceptional dining experience for their residents and staff. In addition, she certifies select professionals in her Kind Dining® philosophy and provides tools, now in an eLearning format, that make learning stick and help people put insights into action. As a result of her work, clients often share their staff has a new sense of purpose, get along better and keep their focus and energy on what matters most. In fact, she wrote a book, Hospitality for Boomers on how to attract residents and keep good team members. In her free time, she enjoys walking Oregon trails and cheering on her favorite soccer teams, the Portland Thorns and Timbers.

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