by Cindy Heilman | Leadership
The Coronavirus has changed the landscape of our lives in a matter of two weeks. A week ago I entered the hospital to visit my husband Mike after his elective back surgery. First, I was screened, temperature taken and a series of questions to answer. I was the only visitor he was allowed to have; not one visitor at a time, but the only visitor for his entire stay. He was the last patient in surgery before the ward was being transformed exclusively for Coronavirus patients.
Each day tighter restrictions were put in place. Only one entrance could be used. Visiting hours were reduced and ended at 6 p.m. It was essential that the visitor remained in the patient’s room at all times until leaving the hospital. The hospital corridors were reminiscent of a ghost town; completely empty. I barely found my way out.
Several clients called to ask my opinion on how to cope with the jarring restrictions, including ending communal dining, in their senior living communities within those four days. Kind Dining® has always stressed the importance of mealtimes in the community dining room. Now it was not permissible. Yet it is most important to enhance residents’ nutritional health, emotional well-being, and quality of life, no matter the setting. That’s true for all of us.
In this complicated and extraordinary battle with COVID-19, it is even more important for different reasons. I’m here today to share a few important tips to create a new normal about eating in isolation. Here are 5 ways that will consistently make a difference.
- Introduce yourself and greet your resident by name.
- Be able to describe their meal as you present their plate.
- Quickly scan the tray for any missing condiments, and have a backup supply close by.
- Exit graciously after sharing a kind word, a community news update, or report on the weather outside.
- Make arrangements for yourself or a co-worker to circle back within 3 minutes to Ask: Is there anything else we can get you?
Keeping this routine lowers the feelings of isolation and frustration. It Improves the feelings of solidarity and familiarity and improves the feeling of appreciation for one another. Expect each interaction to be different but keep your response calm and consistent.
Thank you for your service and for all you do.
by Cindy Heilman | Leadership
When a chef leaves his domain in the kitchen to enter the dining room to say, “Hello, I hope you enjoyed your meal today. I created the menu with you in my mind,” he touches everyone in the dining room creating a bond between himself and the seniors. Relationships begin in the dining room! Seniors may sit at a dining table with strangers and leave after the meal with new friendships beginning to form. Some may last a long time; some may develop into more than friendship.
Business deals are made over the lunch or dinner table. It’s where trust is built and new ideas are created. The dining table is the best asset for your community! It is a powerful tool and can be utilized to build friendships between seniors (who will invite their friends to come to live in their community,) and build friendships with coworkers, cementing a team of food servers that create a flow and ease when serving meals. Kind Dining® helps your food servers to attain that cherished level of friendship with interactive training because it works for everyone involved! Kind Dining encourages food servers to help each other, to work as a team, to be open and friendly with the residents and guests in your dining room. I designed this methodology with kindness in mind. It’s important that we are all kind to each other.
The habits we practice are noticed by others and copied, sometimes without realizing it. It is one of the better ways to learn. Food server-to-senior relationships and food server-to-coworker relationships also frequently require reconnections to company values in order to improve service. Refreshing your food servers with team-building skills through hands-on training is a great way to accomplish goals in the community dining room.
Our B♥ Kind® Tip: Remember, the service given has the power to build friendships.
by Cindy Heilman | Leadership
A friend of a friend who is a food server in a senior living community in the East told me about Mary’s early experience moving into the community about five years after her husband passed away. She timidly stepped into a busy dining room for the first time, glanced around to see all the tables occupied. Robert looked up just as she entered the room, saw her dilemma and immediately stood up, went to her and invited her to sit at his table where there happened to be one seat available. Their conversation over lunch revealed many shared likes in activities. Mary thanked him, explaining that she knew no one at all in the community even though it had been recommended to her by a friend who also planned to move into the community within the following year. Robert was delighted with their conversation at the table and suggested they meet for the dinner hour, too. He could then tell her about the many events and activities offered at her new home. He later said how lucky he was the host who usually greeted seniors at the door, was called away and not there when Mary entered.
As you may have sensed, after a year of spending nearly every day together, their wedding was organized in the community, surrounded by friends and family.
Their story isn’t the only one my friend told me. She mentioned the friendships formed that became bonding and lasting. Sometimes it comes about by sharing a talent such as painting, quilting, or a passion for reading and talking about books. What brought her to tell my friend about the importance of these seniors finding new relationships were they met in the dining room! It was the relaxed atmosphere of being at the table together, ‘breaking bread’ as the saying goes, embracing the rituals of a mealtime. It is an easy way to come to know someone without anxiety or stress.
Recorded stories revealing the pleasures of dining go centuries back in history. Kind Dining® training teaches your food servers how they can improve dining room pleasure for your residents and for your food serving staff. Happy relationships formed between residents can be a result in proper training for food servers. Building strong relationships among the food serving staff to better perform duties, by interacting, make their learning easier and permanent. Kind Dining® training results in teamwork coming from the friendly relationships of your food serving staff.
Our B♥ Kind® Tip: Remember, the service you give has the power to build lasting relationships between seniors and between the food serving staff contributing to a happier community.
by Cindy Heilman | Leadership, Resident Centered Dining Service
It’s more than food servers being courteous to the seniors in your community dining room. It’s more than pulling out a chair or finding the best table for a particular senior to sit. It’s also about being civil, courteous to all your coworkers. It’s about lending a helping hand without anyone asking for help. When a food server notices her teammate has her hands full or needs an inside hint on how to better handle a situation and stepping in, it’s about that. It’s about being kind to the manager, the dishwasher and your food serving teammate, not just another person getting a job done.
It’s about these things and more at Kind Dining® training sessions. It’s about kindness. It’s about civility. Studies show that extending kindness reduces anxiety, creates a feeling of happiness and social connection. These are choices, along with food serving skills that can be learned with practice every day. The mood of the giver of kindness elates as well as the mood of the person receiving the kind gesture. It’s a wonderful moment when you help lift someone out of a mournful mood.
Recently, the media has brought attention to incivility in workplaces and the effects it has on employees and the company itself. They state that employees are more likely to leave a job they actually love because of rudeness and incivility from a coworker or administrator. Uncivil behavior creates toxic situations that can cause serious unrest in any community dining room. If your senior residents aren’t happy in their dining room, they will be looking elsewhere to live. Vacancies in a residence are time-consuming and costly to refill. The community will also lose its best food servers that encourage the homey feeling you want your seniors to enjoy when they appear at mealtimes. Poor relationships between employees are also linked to a lower quality of care.
It’s time to introduce education for collaboration and relationship-building to have a retirement community that is safe and filled with kind food servers that you would want in your own home.
Our B♥ Kind® Tip: Kind Dining helps to heal broken relationships and supports harmony, communication, and team building!
by Cindy Heilman | Leadership, Resident Centered Dining Service
The niece of an acquaintance was telling her experience of being a guest and her first dinner with a friend in a senior retirement community recently. After stating how surprisingly wonderful the food was, she mentioned the service. The server was a young college student working her summer between semesters. She knew this because the girl told them, along with her dreams of a future, lack of money, complaints about working in the dining room and how she planned to break off with her boyfriend. The niece felt the server completely overshadowed what could have been a perfect visit with her friend. She said she didn’t expect good food but got it and she did expect good service and didn’t get it. Professionals and experience food servers know that good service can save a bad meal, yet a good meal cannot save poor service. The memory of it remains.
The young lady wasn’t crude or rude she just didn’t realize how disruptive her behavior was at the table of friends. This behavior is no longer acceptable in senior retirement communities. Residents are demanding respect and they are receiving it. Finding a table to sit where a single or newly widowed resident feels comfortable isn’t always easy in some dining rooms. It is hard for many seniors in that category entering a retirement community. To attempt sitting at a table already seated with two or three couples is a double dose of loss. It is smart for a community to have several tables that hold an uneven number of seats for that purpose.
Teaching food servers to be alert to the single residents entering the dining room and helping them to find a suitable place for them is a wise move. Your food servers will sense fulfillment in helping, the senior will feel confident that he/she is wanted and the community can add another bonus in their favor.
Kind Dining® coaching guides food servers to be aware of single diners, to greet seniors when they enter the dining room, to speak to residents by name, to use small courtesies that are noticed by senior diners and to say a pleasant farewell when residents and guests leave. These are the marks of good coaching, encouraging food servers to be aware and in control of their responsibilities in giving focus to the residents in the community.
Our B♥ Kind® Tip: Practice your Kind Dining® skills every day; they will soon come naturally!
by Cindy Heilman | Leadership
You will find true leadership that shows a deep caring for your residents in different areas of your workplace. Someone from management that stands at the entrance to the dining room on Friday nights to greet seniors, often by name, shows a person bonded to her community. It is an example of food servers note and tuck into their own thoughts about how they may add a little something more to their daily routine. It is mentoring by example. The gesture is appreciated by the residents and noticed by their guests. It matters and communicates that each resident entering the dining room is welcomed and acknowledged. Someone cares.
Management can develop leadership from within by selecting a food server who seems to have natural leadership ability. It is easy to spot them. They are the ones who accept work without being asked to, such as restocking the pantry before the next shift begins. You will find that food server pulling out a chair for a senior or introducing a new resident to a congenial table, aware that being new can be awkward on a first trip to the dining room.
Kind Dining® coaching recommends management attend training sessions to help repair broken lines of communication with the food serving team. While being part of the interactive, hands-on training sessions they may discover important items about food service they may not have known. It is time to improve relationships with food serving staff, to support them in accepting greater responsibility and allow the food serving team to learn how to excel in the field of hospitality. Leaders will emerge from Kind Dining® training to take ownership of their work with a sense of urgency. Fear of culture change will dissolve as they move forward widening their field of responsibility.
Good leaders embrace a shared vision of their food serving team arriving at success in their endeavor. Employees who know their job well, work easier, happier, and take pride in becoming loyal to their company. Loyal employees don’t leave thereby saving the company the high cost of searching and finding replacements. Developing the talents of your food servers will secure a competitive advantage from other senior living communities. Remember to hire food servers who can meet your service standards. Look for those who demonstrate a desire for excellence and have a natural reaction to correct problems with their own ability as they rise.
Our B♥ Kind® Tip: The service of a food serving team is directly related to the success of your community.
by Cindy Heilman | Leadership, Resident Centered Dining Service
Keep in mind that if you have residents in your senior living community, you need a food serving team to serve them. While this sounds elementary, consider that you want skilled, knowledgeable, talented, considerate, food servers that exude a pleasant attitude. Do you wonder where to find them? Do you wonder how to keep those in your employ from searching elsewhere? There are proven ways that keep your food servers wanting to stay with your community and enjoy working in your dining room.
It’s time for Kind Dining® training. Now is the time to set ambitious culture change goals.
Transformation depends firstly on executives, managers, and team leaders learning and following a curriculum proven to work. Food servers were not born with the skills they need for top-notch service but they can be taught person-centered skills that fit your particular community dining room. They will learn to understand your company goals and how to become a valued part of it. Importantly they will learn how to handle the emotions of working with senior service. Train your food servers to know their responsibilities and how to do their job in the best possible way. They will take on a pride in what they do, feel the sense of belonging, of being a part of their community’s and company’s success. Your food servers will adopt a better self-image, new behaviors, reinforce new attitudes and appreciate new standards.
Every time one of your food servers leaves your employ, it costs the company money that could be invested elsewhere in the community. A new employee must be found, hired and trained. Losing even one food server creates a burden of work for the rest of the food serving team, often causes distress especially if she was a favorite of your resident diners.
Research has proven key leadership practices in person-centered care, comes from food servers empowerment to make decisions immediately in their own area of service when it is needed. Growth comes from self-responsibility. Kind Dining® training teaches these basic cultural changes. Even the youth who come to work between their college terms will benefit your community. The training will bring them back each season already knowledgeable and that encouragement may bring them to enter the field of senior living community service when they graduate.
Overcome your food serving team’s resistance to change. Teach them a better way to build a stronger food serving team relationship and your community will have less turn over in your nursing and dining room employment.
Our B♥ Kind® Tip: Take a leadership role by setting a good example today.
by Cindy Heilman | Leadership, Resident Centered Dining Service
An acquaintance recently told me about her teacher friend who was about to quit her position as a third-grade teacher. She could endure the ogre of a principal in the small school no longer. The woman caused friction between the other teachers and completely upset the staff, causing havoc and creating dissension with every one of her new rules and decisions. The principal had been on the job for less than a year. Mostly everyone else had been with the school for more than ten years.
She knew when she started that teaching at this particular school meant low pay. But, because she loved her students and the influence she had on them made up for the low pay. Knowing she was worth more contented her. She also enjoyed working together with the teaching staff to bring new programs for these children of lower-income families. Then a wonderful thing happened just in time to save her. The principal handed in her resignation! It seems she had a family emergency that needed tending. All who worked at the school in any capacity rejoiced. “Kind of behind closed doors so no one outside the school would know,” she said.
The teacher continued to tell her friend how the administration returned to allowing the teachers to seek better ways of instilling the desire to learn in the children now that the disliked principal was gone. They encouraged the teachers to expand their concepts and plans. The teachers enjoyed a good relationship with each other and extended complete support.
Kind Dining® trains food servers in a retirement community to benefit from the same doctrine. When encouraged to become part of solving problems that arise and seeking new ways of improvement, food servers adopt ownership of the work they do. When the food serving team is aware of how important they are to the seniors they serve, their attitude changes the way they see their job. People don’t generally leave their job because of low pay, they leave because the administration doesn’t support them, encourage them or thank them for the good work they do. It’s a lack of appreciation that hurts the person who does the best they can. That’s when their job becomes meaningless. Why bother with a meaningless job when they can go somewhere else they are appreciated.
In a senior living community where personal care is applauded, that same personal care applies to the food serving team. To increase food serving staff stability, management must update their training practices.
Our B♥ Kind® Tip: Thanks for the service you give. It honors the residents.
by Cindy Heilman | Leadership, Resident Centered Dining Service
Robert opened a bistro in a small town expecting people to flock in just because his place was new. Just in case that didn’t happen, he had a plan to use coupons, specials, and discounts to get people to try his menus. He knew once they came they would return. He was that confident in his menu, his serving staff, and his charming dining room.
He was right. His bistro was the cat’s meow. Once people came in, tasted his food, were charmed by his staff and felt happy sitting in such a lovely room they couldn’t wait to tell their friends, family, and neighbors about this new bistro in town. Word quickly spread. While he did some inexpensive ads in the next town over, he never needed coupons or discounts. The dining experience spoke for itself. People lined up at lunchtime and sometimes came in early so they could get a table without waiting.
The dining room in your senior community is a great marketing tool. Let it speak for itself when you know your menus are varied and tempting to the palate. Look at the ambiance as if you were an invited guest unrelated to the community. See what a guest sees and feels when they enter the dining room. Would they feel welcome? Would their eyes and nose tell them that this was the place they wanted to sit at the table to enjoy a dining experience with friends, not just a place to get a bite to eat? Would they tell their friends and neighbors about this wonderful place when they were ready for a retirement home? Do their guests say they are pleased with your senior community being their friend’s new home?
Investing in your community dining room is a wise decision. Kind Dining® can help you have a dining room that matches the success of the bistro mentioned above. We can train your food servers to adopt the attitude of being happy to see your residents enter the dining room. The diners in return will be happy to see them, because your food servers will be competent, polite, caring, and loving what they contribute to the dining hour. Your food servers and seniors will look forward to seeing each other because mealtime is more than just getting a bite to eat.
The dining room is the most important place for improvement investments in your senior retirement community and your food servers are where you begin.
Our B♥ Kind® Tip: Train your food servers to make a good first impression at every meal.
by Cindy Heilman | Leadership
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The beginning of a new year and a new decade is the perfect time to take stock and decide what new training needs to be considered to make your senior living community dining room better. Take note of where your food preparers and your food servers need new instruction and guidance. The Kind Dining® training series can introduce new ways to correct old habits that are detrimental to mealtimes though it may not be realized until you use close scrutiny. Even one person not working to their full capacity can disrupt a mealtime for every food server and senior diner. Remember when a food server becomes skilled it touches everyone; the food preparers, the other food servers and everyone in the dining room every mealtime. Every movement a food server makes is a skill that has been learned, not a talent they were born with.
Kind Dining® training methodology can improve your minimum wage, unskilled employees by teaching them how to interact with residents, improve their relationships with their supervisors, and create a better working environment because they will have a better self-image. I have designed my modules to educate food servers about doing meaningful work, skill development, setting goals, and making connections that will benefit them. The result will stimulate creativity and instill employee commitment. Employees don’t leave a job where they are appreciated and enjoy doing. Through better service, your community dining room will top the competitive advantage. Your food preparers and food servers will take pride in their part of creating a revered community dining room.
Other major changes in the senior living community dining room is the regulation that the individual matters and must have choices. Focus is definitely on the resident as an individual. At one senior living community, the culinary staff is actually collaborating and respecting the opinions of its residents. New trends include the Food-to-Table movement for fresh, locally grown foods, and the hiring of chefs who have leanings toward restaurant service rather than industry dining rooms. Another senior living community is experimenting with keeping restaurant hours 24/7 where everyone can eat whenever they want, just by entering the dining room and ordering from a menu. This is intended to aid residents who need to eat food with medicines they take during the night.
The old adage that says “employees tend to leave their managers, not their jobs” tells us that supervisors need to be in on the training sessions, too. When it comes to bringing your senior living community into the next decade, it’s the duty of everyone to attend training sessions to freshen up their position. Each person is necessary to build a good working team.
Our B♥ Kind® Tip: Good service can save a bad meal. A good meal cannot save bad service.
by Cindy Heilman | Leadership
Welcome news is being spread around that culinary schools such as Johnson & Wales and the CIA (Culinary Institute of America) have redesigned the curriculum to focus on teaching cooking for the senior population. The baby boomers enjoy dining on sushi and drinking lattes. This is the generation that has traveled the world and enjoyed cruise ship vacations. They have been introduced to the cuisines of foreign countries and conditioned their taste buds. Benefits learned from spas in the mountains and spas in the valleys relieve stress and detox their bodies. Seniors have learned to appreciate drinking fresh fruit-flavored water. Now as many are moving into senior living communities, they are looking for these offerings in the dining rooms before making any decision on which one will be their home. Some of these higher-end communities have reported hiring 3-star chefs because the community dining room is a competitive advantage.
Senior living communities that are not luxury based have found their dining room meals improved tremendously by utilizing local farmers’ markets for fresh supplies at equal cost-effective ways. Chefs plan menus and introduce healthy foods to tempt the taste buds as well as rely on long-time favorite stand-bys. Herb gardens planted outside the kitchen stoop keep costs down while keeping quality and flavor up. The new, positive culinary frontier can be adapted into the present budget.
Kind Dining® coaching encourages the food serving staff to work as a team with the kitchen food preparers generating a smooth, pleasant mealtime for residents and their guests. While the chef adopts seasonal options to create nutritionally balanced meals their teammate-food servers greet seniors with a cheerful welcome and guide them to table-friendly diners if they enter the dining room alone. While the culinary team is thoughtfully ordering regional foods and creating specialty menus, paying attention to gluten-free, heart-healthy, and pureed and textured foods, again their food serving team will recite menus and options with knowledge and familiarity, answering any questions the diners may have.
The New Year is the perfect time to make the improvements needed in your kitchen and dining room food preparing and serving staff. Upgrade their skills and allow your food serving team to become the team revered by others for their community dining room finesse. Kind Dining® helps to heal broken relationships and supports harmony, communication, and team-building! When your food preparers and food servers perform their duties easily and work with their teammates, they will come to love their job, the people they serve and the company that employs them. It’s a great plan to begin a new year!
Our B♥ Kind® Tip: You are important to your company’s reputation; how meals are prepared and served MATTERS!
by Cindy Heilman | Leadership
January is a great time to think about looking forward. Starting a new year gives many seniors the idea of starting over . . . by changing their lifestyle. They will be casting aside the dread of aging by embracing it as a time to bring the dreams of their youth to life that they once set aside for family obligations. These seniors will put worry about house repairs, maintenance and upgrades behind them by moving into a retirement home. They will quickly learn that the center of any retirement community is the dining room. The mealtime table in this new chosen lifestyle is where new friendships are formed and older friendships are maintained. The food serving team carries a trusted position in providing the residents with a dining room where they feel welcome and comfortable with the food serving staff and with other residents.
Kind Dining ® training alerts food servers to the power they hold by simple interactions such as listening to an elder, asking if a coffee cup refill is desired, the courtesy of a ‘good-bye,’ a chair pulled out for a diner, a pleasant smile of greeting, or a mobility impairment of an elder. Food servers need to know their residents well enough to recognize a problem by their expression or shyness. It is necessary to know the respect and honor that passes between food servers and the residents. Excellent service is so much more than carrying food to a table.
Caring food servers also embrace those same considerations to her fellow food serving team. They will have restocked the pantry for the next shift, lent a hand to a teammate who needed it, and smiled as fondly at her teammates as she had to the residents she serves. The changes required to improve the dining room service can be a goal for New Year’s resolutions. Creating positive changes may appear to be difficult but with practice, improvements will come. Consistency eventually creates confidence. To be comfortable in a food server’s position is a power in itself and a goal to be proudly attained.
It is time for your retirement community to move forward in achieving new regulations. The old way is no longer acceptable. Communication is the key to the success of working as a team in the new plan. Determination and persistence may pay off with a giant celebration that all may participate knowing their share of effort helped in the success in the new year.
Our B♥ Kind® Tip: As so many seniors are doing, it’s time to start over, completely change your lifestyle into areas where you resist change at your job.
by Cindy Heilman | Leadership
Starting a new year brings starting over to mind. There are a zillion stories out there about starting over. Surprisingly many are stories from people in their 40s leaving higher paying positions in what they consider toxic environments to find employment in a healthier area or taking a giant leap to start their own business. Once, those over 60 reluctantly faced retirement. Today they are looking forward to that age when they can set new goals. Diana Nyad at 69 years old is the only person to swim from Florida to Cuba without a shark cage. Frank McCourt wrote his first book, a best seller, after he retired from 30 years of teaching. Well-known actor Estelle Getty was in her 60s when she won her first Emmy.
Seniors are known to be among the happiest groups of people. They now have the time to do what they want without the usual duties and obligations to interfere. Seniors have accumulated wisdom, confidence, social skills, and generally have a guaranteed minimum income through Social Security. This sense of freedom allows them to happily start over.
Often they sell the homestead, sometimes moving to an entirely different part of the country and choose a senior living community for that life style change. Their challenge is finding the community that fits into their plans perfectly. If there is one area of any retirement community that needs to outshine the rest it is the dining room.
Kind Dining® can help them choose your senior community by helping you to have a dining room that everyone wants to claim as their own. Through our training, your food serving team will love the work they do because, with practice, it will become second nature to them. When food servers perform their job with pleasure, they take pride in what they do and take extra care with those they serve. Your community dining room can be a magnet that draws your residents to mealtimes that they want to introduce to their friends and families.
Our training series can teach your food servers to approach their work with improved serving skills and a different mindset toward the residents and their coworkers. Food servers include the part of the team, who are usually unseen, those in the kitchen. They will learn how to use fresh ideas to improve their performance by making their work easier. You want all your food servers to work as a team reaching out for the same goal and making your lifestyle community the one seniors are seeking.
Our B♥ Kind® Tip: Does your food serving team help each other provide better service?
by Cindy Heilman | Leadership
A friend mentioned that Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Christmas story has been accused of exposing the young stag to bullying. She claimed that his dad Donner, made fun of his red nose and shunned him. Furthermore the school coach said, “From now on, gang, we won’t let Rudolph join in any reindeer games, right?”
A tremendous number of people responded by tweeting their opinions. Not all of them took kindly to the criticism. My friend happily noted that the problem was resolved to everyone’s satisfaction when Santa needed the red nose that caused so much consternation.
For certain, that is a situation you want to avoid in your retirement community. Because something has always ‘been that way’ if it is hurtful, the old way must be changed. Kind Dining® teaches new sensitivity training for your food service team. It’s vital that they are alert to any behavior that is negative to your retirement community. That means being aware of treating others on the food serving team with courtesy, kindness, and consideration as well as treating your residents the same.
Your food servers can be trained to be observant to the residents’ sentiments; if they need a bit of an uplifting comment or encouragement in finding a table to join. The baby boomers who have chosen a new way of living by making a retirement community their home have embraced their worldly experiences. They look for diversity in their neighbors and their culture. It especially shows up in the dining room. Kind Dining® staff training teaches cultivating relationship skills between food servers and residents. Building self-esteem is important for your food serving staff and breaks down the barriers people have created. It’s about teamwork that includes hospitality for residents. Everyone receives personal attention in the dining room. No one is left out or made to feel excluded.
Residents use 60% of their typical day preparing for and enjoying the dining room experience. Yes, it is more than just grabbing a bite to eat. It is a social time to share a meal with friends tended by a serving staff that caters to them. It is important that residents feel their appearance in the dining room is wanted by other residents. The food serving staff can help the resident feel welcome by introducing them to other diners, by initiating conversations and by giving their attention. Your food servers have the power to create an extended family friendliness.
Our B♥ Kind® Tip: Is there a new resident in your dining room today? Make an effort to get to know them.
by Cindy Heilman | Leadership
A friend said the winter holiday season was a favorite of hers because it was the only time of year when extended family came to visit when she was a child. The adults gathered around the dining room table laden with all the holiday foods that were never seen during the year. When the table was cleared, the nuts, fruits, and drinks were set out. That was when the stories began to flow. The children were set up in the kitchen to eat, then outside to play afterwards.
At that time, she was sure to sit quietly on the floor in the perimeter of the room so she wouldn’t be chased away with “go play. Grown-ups are talking.” That’s the exact reason she wanted to remain. No one told family stories the rest of the year. This was her time to learn the family lore, the struggles that were made, and the triumphs. She also heard the stories of the childhoods of this older generation. She could never get her mother or father to talk about when they were children. They always replied with, “Oh, that was long ago. I don’t remember.”
Of course she continued with the same tradition in her own household. Now that she lived in a retirement community she thoroughly enjoyed gathering with the warmth of the dining table to listen to her friends and neighbors tell of their holiday traditions. They were varied from different ethnic backgrounds and religions.
“That’s what makes it so interesting to me.” She continued, “The friends I met in the community have stories that are new to me and diverse. We all reminisce which keeps our own stories alive. Sometimes photos of earlier holidays are brought out to share. Family stories flow and there is no one to chase me away.”
Kind Dining® training centers on the dining room being the heart of the residents’ day. This is a certainty during the multi-holiday season. Most residents prefer to remain in their home where convenience reigns rather than the challenge of travel with all its fuss and chaos. Celebrating the season by sharing stories at the table chases isolation away. Being able to speak of one’s own past holidays actually keeps a senior active in the present.
Food servers can add to the ambiance of festivity by wearing holiday related accessories that will spark comments and conversations between residents and the food serving staff. Holiday aprons that are cheerful and attractive are popular and fun. The chef may take requests for particular holiday foods to bring authenticity to the stories shared. Decorations in the dining room add to the joy of the season increasing even the weakest of appetites. It is a season for enjoying the camaraderie of retirement community life.
Our B♥ Kind® Tip: Sharing stories of past holidays chases away feelings of isolation!
by Cindy Heilman | Leadership
My friend’s brother returned home to the States after 50 years of living abroad. “Nearly all of those years were in Puerto Rico where he owned a very successful business. Now his health was failing and he yearned for the land of his youth. Our family was a multi-generation of chefs and cooks. Our other brother also owned a restaurant at one time. Our father was a chef and during the depression he cooked in an institution as did my mother’s mother. My mother did a lot of volunteer cooking for fund raisers.”
She continued, “During a brief stay in the hospital, the first time since his youth, my brother was quite surprised at the food menu offered. He was equally surprised that he had a choice and the actual meals served were far superior than he expected. Critical comments were all he had heard from others who did have the experience of hospital stays.
“He was so pleased that he wrote on his menu, Thank you for the delicious food you presented. I
am very impressed.
“One of the food servers must have shown it to the chef. The chef came up to my brother’s room to spend a few minutes with the only patient who had ever sent a note to the kitchen. And it was complimentary besides! The visit impressed my brother even more.”
I mention this because a connection was made that is meaningful to any community dining room. Chefs cook because they love what they do. The connection from chef to resident is the connection between selecting and preparing fresh, carefully cooked, appetizing meals to the residents. It is essential for the chef to occasionally step into the dining room to say hello, I hope you enjoyed your meal today. It isn’t necessary to do this every day but it does make a difference. It forms a crucial connection. It brings a personal touch to both the kitchen staff and the residents.
Kind Dining® training encourages forming these connections within the food service team to the residents. Personal appearances by the chef create a sense of trust. The residents will know this chef and his kitchen staff truly care about how his efforts in creating tempting meals are received. Each one matters.
Our B♥ Kind ® Tip: Building connections between your food serving team and your residents is
crucial.
by Cindy Heilman | Leadership
Remember when you were a little kid going to school and the teacher responded to your raised hand when you knew the answer? A friend was telling me about her memory.
“I was learning to read in first grade. I raised my hand to read a sentence and my teacher, Mrs. Smith called on me by name. She took time to boost my self-esteem by easing me out of my shyness. She made me feel special by paying attention to me. Sometimes she would remark about my work or my hair, something personal. I’ll always remember her for it and it has been many decades ago. It gave me courage to speak out unafraid. There was always a nice comment written on my report card, too. Mom and Dad were delighted to read that. Of course, as I look back, I realize now what I didn’t realize then, that she made each one of us feel special.”
Remembering how you felt and responded to a kindness, even from as long ago as your young childhood can be turned into a guideline in present day food serving techniques. What made you feel special long ago will bring the same results with the seniors in your community dining room.
Memories are wonderful moments to call on when wanting to nurture the seniors your food servers attend at mealtimes. Be sincere. Encourage your staff to find just one little item about a senior that they can honestly compliment on. Advise them to watch the power of their words work. If the senior pays the compliment forward it could turn viral and you’ll have a full dining room of joyful, smiling seniors. The end result lifts the compliment giver’s spirit, too. They will feel happier, raising their own self esteem. Kind Dining® coaching helps your dining room staff to come by these techniques and incorporate them into their daily routines so they become as natural to them as breathing.
Paying personal attention to a senior at mealtime is a small matter that carries a long way. If the person is shy, it will give confidence and build trust between you. A small act of kindness will change a bad mood. Just being recognized will change your diner’s thoughts to positive ones. You may have just pulled a resident out of a depression, or at least brightened her way. It’s known that receiving a compliment ignites creativity and sometimes unblocks a thinking process. A compliment can bring on a smile which may turn into laughter and we all know that laughter burns calories?
Our B♥ Kind ® Tip: Happiness is contagious.
by Cindy Heilman | Leadership
My friend Alice told me about meeting with a long-time friend recently. Knowing my Kind Dining® beliefs and dedication to senior retirement communities, she thought of me as the conversation unfolded. “My girlfriend brought me up to date on the small hotel business she and her husband bought in a small town, two years ago.” She said, “They both had experience in that industry but were shifting their work time to other things they loved to do. Now in midlife, he’s an artist and she’s a writer so they didn’t want to spend masses of time in the hotel every day.
Most of the staff had been with the hotel for years and could practically run it on their own. She said that one of the surprises they didn’t expect was how the hotel dining room brought in a large portion of income. “At first, the dining room was the only area of the hotel that fell below par when they took the hotel over. They asked friends who the staff would not recognize, to dine there and give them an honest assessment on what needed to be improved. Then they got down to making changes starting with discussions with the chef, taking note of his enthusiasm but lack of adventure because the former owners would not allow him to stretch his talents. We saw a definite change in his demeanor when we gave him full control and responsibility of menus and his prepping cooks. He had all these wonderful ideas tucked inside him waiting to let them loose!
“Then we gathered the wait staff for a meeting hour between lunch and dinner. We introduced training exercises showing them how we wanted them to perform and teaching them what results could be expected. We also handed them the opportunity for living hospitality, giving them our interpretation of what it is and how to attain it. We encouraged them to notice what improvements they would like to see happen, promising a meeting twice a month to discuss whatever they wanted to talk about in regards to the dining room. Only one person was grumpy. We decided to give him some time to acclimate since he was a long time employee. It was clear though, that it was his obligation to make the effort.”
Alice recalled that they spent time in the beginning reinforcing their new goals for their employees and were on hand to encourage the staff with their presence. But once the food servers worked as a team, it all smoothed out. Allowing the chef to incorporate his ideas turned the dining room into a well-received restaurant. As the restaurant became popular, people booked their rooms for entire weekends. Who would have thought the dining room had the power to make a tremendous success for the entire hotel? While a small hotel is not a retirement community, the basics are the same and the results could be also.
Our B♥ Kind ® Tip: Remember, hospitality is an attitude of caring.
When a chef leaves his domain in the kitchen to enter the dining room to say, “Hello, I hope you enjoyed your meal today. I created the menu with you in my mind,” he touches everyone in the dining room creating a bond between himself and the seniors. Relationships begin in the dining room! Seniors may sit at a dining table with strangers and leave after the meal with new friendships beginning to form. Some may last a long time; some may develop into more than friendship.
It’s more than food servers being courteous to the seniors in your community dining room. It’s more than pulling out a chair or finding the best table for a particular senior to sit. It’s also about being civil, courteous to all your coworkers. It’s about lending a helping hand without anyone asking for help. When a food server notices her teammate has her hands full or needs an inside hint on how to better handle a situation and stepping in, it’s about that. It’s about being kind to the manager, the dishwasher and your food serving teammate, not just another person getting a job done.
The niece of an acquaintance was telling her experience of being a guest and her first dinner with a friend in a senior retirement community recently. After stating how surprisingly wonderful the food was, she mentioned the service. The server was a young college student working her summer between semesters. She knew this because the girl told them, along with her dreams of a future, lack of money, complaints about working in the dining room and how she planned to break off with her boyfriend. The niece felt the server completely overshadowed what could have been a perfect visit with her friend. She said she didn’t expect good food but got it and she did expect good service and didn’t get it. Professionals and experience food servers know that good service can save a bad meal, yet a good meal cannot save poor service. The memory of it remains.
Keep in mind that if you have residents in your senior living community, you need a food serving team to serve them. While this sounds elementary, consider that you want skilled, knowledgeable, talented, considerate, food servers that exude a pleasant attitude. Do you wonder where to find them? Do you wonder how to keep those in your employ from searching elsewhere? There are proven ways that keep your food servers wanting to stay with your community and enjoy working in your dining room. 
An acquaintance recently told me about her teacher friend who was about to quit her position as a third-grade teacher. She could endure the ogre of a principal in the small school no longer. The woman caused friction between the other teachers and completely upset the staff, causing havoc and creating dissension with every one of her new rules and decisions. The principal had been on the job for less than a year. Mostly everyone else had been with the school for more than ten years. 
Robert opened a bistro in a small town expecting people to flock in just because his place was new. Just in case that didn’t happen, he had a plan to use coupons, specials, and discounts to get people to try his menus. He knew once they came they would return. He was that confident in his menu, his serving staff, and his charming dining room.
Welcome news is being spread around that culinary schools such as Johnson & Wales and the CIA (Culinary Institute of America) have redesigned the curriculum to focus on teaching cooking for the senior population. The baby boomers enjoy dining on sushi and drinking lattes. This is the generation that has traveled the world and enjoyed cruise ship vacations. They have been introduced to the cuisines of foreign countries and conditioned their taste buds. Benefits learned from spas in the mountains and spas in the valleys relieve stress and detox their bodies. Seniors have learned to appreciate drinking fresh fruit-flavored water. Now as many are moving into senior living communities, they are looking for these offerings in the dining rooms before making any decision on which one will be their home. Some of these higher-end communities have reported hiring 3-star chefs because the community dining room is a competitive advantage.
January is a great time to think about looking forward. Starting a new year gives many seniors the idea of starting over . . . by changing their lifestyle. They will be casting aside the dread of aging by embracing it as a time to bring the dreams of their youth to life that they once set aside for family obligations. These seniors will put worry about house repairs, maintenance and upgrades behind them by moving into a retirement home. They will quickly learn that the center of any retirement community is the dining room. The mealtime table in this new chosen lifestyle is where new friendships are formed and older friendships are maintained. The food serving team carries a trusted position in providing the residents with a dining room where they feel welcome and comfortable with the food serving staff and with other residents.
Starting a new year brings starting over to mind. There are a zillion stories out there about starting over. Surprisingly many are stories from people in their 40s leaving higher paying positions in what they consider toxic environments to find employment in a healthier area or taking a giant leap to start their own business. Once, those over 60 reluctantly faced retirement. Today they are looking forward to that age when they can set new goals. Diana Nyad at 69 years old is the only person to swim from Florida to Cuba without a shark cage. Frank McCourt wrote his first book, a best seller, after he retired from 30 years of teaching. Well-known actor Estelle Getty was in her 60s when she won her first Emmy.
A friend said the winter holiday season was a favorite of hers because it was the only time of year when extended family came to visit when she was a child. The adults gathered around the dining room table laden with all the holiday foods that were never seen during the year. When the table was cleared, the nuts, fruits, and drinks were set out. That was when the stories began to flow. The children were set up in the kitchen to eat, then outside to play afterwards.
Remember when you were a little kid going to school and the teacher responded to your raised hand when you knew the answer? A friend was telling me about her memory.
My friend Alice told me about meeting with a long-time friend recently. Knowing my Kind Dining® beliefs and dedication to senior retirement communities, she thought of me as the conversation unfolded. “My girlfriend brought me up to date on the small hotel business she and her husband bought in a small town, two years ago.” She said, “They both had experience in that industry but were shifting their work time to other things they loved to do. Now in midlife, he’s an artist and she’s a writer so they didn’t want to spend masses of time in the hotel every day.