by Cindy Heilman | Leadership, Resident Centered Dining Service
The best experience you can give your residents is the employee who loves to come to work every day. This is the result of taking the hassle out of the hospitality you offer. Encourage all of your employees to become friendly with each other, to work as a team, helping each other when help is needed the most. This is a key to the community that flows smoothly, eliminating costly upsets. When your employees enjoy the work they do, they bring out the happiness of your residents in a natural way. This is nurturing that is a skill and cannot be forced, but can be discovered lying beneath the surface of the untrained server. The reality and logic of this plan can come from Kind Dining training for all your staff from your caregivers, housekeepers, nurses, to your managers.
Encourage camaraderie between employees at all levels and those employees with the residents. This dissolves walls that isolate people. Including your residents in this seemingly casual way makes them feel an important part of the community. They will thoroughly enjoy an enriching conversation with any staff member. It is a warm feeling of welcome that long remains after the initial newness. Residents will boast about their home where the staff feels like family. It is the staff, and servers in particular, that they see more often than family. This is a lifeline to keeping your community vibrant, alive with people who are joyful with their home environment.
Hospitality has always started with welcoming people to your home, your table. It is the same with your residents in this place they have chosen to live the remainder of their lives. The dining room has become more significant than ever. Since the heart of your community is the dining room this is where your servers’ playfulness with the residents will reflect hospitality the most. Kind Dining® will train all your servers to understand that they carry this vital shared responsibility. When the community runs smoothly troubling incidents are eliminated. Investing in valuable training is a better choice than fixing costly repairs in the fabric of running a successful community.
by Cindy Heilman | Leadership, Resident Centered Dining Service
Now is a good time to pay attention to particulars that may arise with the holidays coming up on the horizon. Seniors often prefer inviting family and friends to the community instead of breaking their routines by going out. This proved to be true when an informal poll taken in several communities in December 2016 was published in the Huffington Post, by Laura Dixon. It revealed that 50 to 80 percent of their residents chose this option.
It also provides the perfect opportunity, with decorations creating a warm, cozy feeling in your facility, to allow your residents’ guests to experience your dining room superiority when they notice the positive attitude of your Kind Dining-trained servers and the personal attention paid to each resident. When these culture changes appear, your residents know that someone is listening to them. The dining room is your greatest asset!
At this time of the year, when your clients are sentimental and missing their former lives. A thoughtful consideration goes a long way to soothing a sad resident. Introducing specialty holiday foods will be noticed and greatly appreciated. These small additions to the menu will fill many pockets of yearning and your residents will introduce a remembered story to tell their dining companions. This is so important, socially, in forming new friendships in the dining room.
Since the dining room is the heart of the community where residents socialize during their three meals a day, it is also the ideal place to focus on kindness. It can turn around an unhappy resident who may be complaining about a food or service, when they are really suffering a change of medicine affecting him adversely or family attention she really craves. Once your servers are trained they will recognize this immediately and be able to respond with kind understanding.
Add the appearance of your chef in the dining room after the main course, asking if they are savoring the meals he created especially for their holiday enjoyment and the seniors will know that he really is putting their desires first. This holiday season turn your facility into an exceptional community that speaks for itself by using Truths 1, 2, & 6 from the Six Truths. #1: Mealtime is the Best Marketing Tool for Your Community. #2: Seniors in the Community Focus on Meal Times. #6 Investing in Your Employees is Best for Culture Change.
Learn more about the 6 truths in 5 minutes, by watching the video on our website.
Be sure to watch for our new Table tips message on Tuesday’s beginning next month, and our Share a Kindness Today, Thursday Blog posts.
Thank you for choosing Higher Standards as your training partner, and Kind Dining as your training tool.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you, the people you serve, friends and family,
by Cindy Heilman | Leadership, Resident Centered Dining Service
Kind Dining Six Truths are especially important during the end-of-the-year holidays beginning with Thanksgiving.
Truth #3 teaches that residents will appreciate being served by positive thinking staff during this joyous season. This bringing warmth to the table® will greatly help to keep the blues at bay for many residents who are adjusting to this new pattern of life. Happiness is contagious and passes between the serving staff and all they serve. It grows from there.
Picture taking is more popular than ever today as seen on Social Media. Residents can make memory books filling them with photos taken around their Thanksgiving and Christmas decorated home that includes new friends, family gatherings, and gingerbread house or centerpiece competitions set up in the dining room. Even special holiday meals and desserts are selected subjects for the camera.
Contented residents who have found what they expected in a community, (Truth # 4) full of pride in where they live, far exceeds a paid advertisement and carries more weight when the word is passed along. In Truth # 5 we learned that well-trained servers become competent employees who have learned how to be cognizant of your client’s needs and are delighted to be part of making them happy. This investment in your employees multiplies, affecting the community in the most positive way.
You will want the dining room to have a look of exciting holiday festivities, inviting with the aroma of food cooked with care, servers who smile, and soft seasonal music to enhance your community mood is kindness at its best.
New federal guidelines are moving into the community. The end of the year season is a time for adding new ways of doing things, of making culture changes that are good for all, for working together to make life easier and more content, for residents and staff that are trained with kindness in mind, regardless of which job they do. There is a passion in hospitality. This is Kind Dining®.
