Blog
Do you know what good leadership does?
Customer-first policy is a result of solid, forward-thinking leadership that filters down from a confident administrative staff. A manager who serves meals on a holiday shift so a food server can have the day with her family creates a loyal team member. That server...
Do you consider meal times for your marketing plan?
Mealtimes are still your best marketing. Resident-centered food service is where your community quality shows through the strongest. The focus is still on the residents’ preferences and necessities whether making their meal choices from a menu or special food stations...
What is your truth about food service?
Aiden met Robert during a break after a staff meeting at his new position in a senior living community. He was rather new in the field and repeated what he learned in his earlier classes while still in school, that there was always something new to learn in keeping up...
Have your food servers adapted to new changes in your community?
Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures. That is what many senior living communities learned in 2020. It was a year when hard decisions had to be made in quick time that would certainly benefit residents as they were the main object of consideration. We...
Do your leaders interact with food servers at training sessions?
Leadership is no more about telling people what to do than good training is about being told what to do. Leaders of quality prefer a do–as-i-do rather than a do-as-i-say belief. They attend all meetings that are designed for food server participation so they can hear...
Do you trust your food servers to make snap decisions?
“The late James Beard said, ‘Food is our common ground, our universal experience.’ He was not only a great chef but also an instructor, TV personality, and you’ll find at least 4 of his cookbooks on my kitchen bookshelf,” said a woman socially distanced by eating her...
Do your food servers know they are heroes ?
Sally had no idea that within a short period of time she went from being just a food server in a senior living community to be a hero. That’s what COVID-19 did for many faithful employees. Sally never gave it much thought. She just came into work, did her job as best...
Have you adapted to food serving changes brought about in 2020?
Alice was walking down the hallway and telling a new coworker that it has been a year that she wasn’t sure the community would get through. ‘Here it is, behind us, and we have overcome some difficult hardships, made tough decisions while keeping the safety and comfort...
Do your food servers eat with their teammates?
Like never before, teamwork in the Assisted Living and Long-Term Care communities have been vital. The sudden transition of formal dining rooms, cozy corner in-house cafes, and food courts shut down because the pandemic has required food serving teams to make drastic...
Is your serving staff looking forward to a new year with gratefulness?
We have a new year to look forward to, carrying the experience of living through an unprecedented year of the pandemic that has not happened before in our lifetime. Many older adults have lived through sorrow and loss and had built resilience to get them through the...
Have resolutions for your community improvements for 2021 been formed?
This past year has sent many retirement communities back to square one, unable to utilize the plans of moving forward they had set in place. Finally, there is light ahead that will bring us relief as the vaccines become available. Our resilience and adaptability have...
Are your food serving teams starting 2021 knowing the best way possible to work?
While waiting in line to mail packages at the post office, a friend noted two women discussing, behind masks, of course, their disappointments in the year 2020. They both believed it was going to be a super year instead of the shocker it became, teaching us all new...
Does your community encourage leadership in your food servers?
We often can benefit from learning a new way of doing something we’ve always done without thought. This applies to the workday of many food servers in the community of older adults. Learning how to work smarter on the job, by finding solutions to our communication...
Do your mealtimes impact residents’ quality of life?
A friend of a friend was having a conversation about the blues, being in a terrible rut during this coronavirus-instigated quarantine until she received a greeting card from a long-time friend. She had not heard from her in a few years. She spoke of that special,...
Is your community touched by kindness?
A woman was talking to her friend, saying that the kindness of strangers is spreading. While buying a soldier a cup of coffee, paying for her meal, or toll on the turnpike continues, random acts of kindness have spread and touched assisted living and nursing...
Do you remember the Holiday dinners of your youth?
“If you are of a certain age you will probably remember receiving some nuts, a few candies, and an orange or apple in the Christmas stocking you hung on the fireplace or other important spot in your house when you were a young child. My brothers and I were thrilled to...
How are changes touching your life this year?
Changes are going on all the time, even in these pandemic times which have changed our lives dramatically in the last year. Most of the time, we don’t really take notice because our focus is on the responsibilities in our lives. The biggest change this year in senior...
Is it more than just serving a meal?
In pre-COVID 19 times, the chef would create special socializing events to bring residents together over his food offerings for festive occasions, celebrate memorable holidays, family gatherings, and mark appropriate events for residents. Even though communities are...
Have your food servers mastered the skills of adapting to change with fortitude, patience, and kindness?
Even in these hard times of pandemic, we have much to be thankful for in our senior living community. We have been fortunate to learn quickly how to protect our environment, residents, staff, and have learned ways of social distancing in everyday activities. ...
There is No Sincerer Love than the Love of Food
"There is no sincerer love than the love of food." — George Bernard Shaw A friend who comes from a family of cooks starting with the great-grandmother, down to the grandmother, mother, and father, and two brothers who each had a neighborhood restaurant, one in the...
Is your chef part of the team?
“Food is everything we are. It’s an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, personal history, province, region, tribe, and grandma. It’s inseparable from those from the get-go.” ~ Anthony Bourdain The late celebrity chef’s chef Anthony Bourdain loved his...
Do your food servers understand and use empathy?
Being a top-performing food server in a senior care community is complex and challenging at the best of times. During COVID 19 it is so much more. Add being alert to the residents' emotions, having small chit-chat handy, and being cheerful and making sure they have...
Has the New Normal Become Part of Daily Routine of Your Food Servers?
The discussion was all about new words and phrases coming into our language every year. One man was complaining that he couldn’t understand a word his grandson said to him. The other two laughed, agreeing with him in complete understanding. Then the words New Normal...
Does your food serving team know they are present-day heroes?
It’s harvest time for your food serving team. During these times of COVID 19, they realize the skills learned have been so critical to their work in the community. To harvest their sense of fulfillment and to acknowledge that they are the heroes of today. Is that not...
Is your food serving team performing beyond their duty?
While trying to stay in touch with family, Dina’s niece emailed her at her retirement community, asking if she had been visiting the kids lately. The kids had kids of their own and often held family celebrations or took Dina out to dinner, shopping, or somewhere...
Is your community restructuring to keep up with modern times?
Supportive staff administration, especially your food serving team, is the keyword in successfully Senior Living (SL), Rehabilitation Centers, and Long Term Care (LTC) communities. Kind Dining® strongly urges that an organized environment creates a comforting sense of...
Do your food servers realize the anxiety a person feels when changing their lifestyle?
The story came to me about two friends discussing his time in a Long Term Care facility. She came to visit and asked about his experience so far since he had not been there very long. He didn’t mention any medical routines performed each day. He talked about the way...
Do your food servers practice hospitality and health care without hassle?
Some folks think improving food service in Senior Living Residential and Nursing Homes means making the food tastier or more varied. Training for better dining and food service is so much more. It includes learning and practicing a new brand of hospitality until it...
Do your food servers know how to engage a conversation with an older person?
Alice was one of those women who never lacked for something to say. She wasn’t trying to earn a degree or win an award. She just knew it relaxed the older people when she served their meals, especially newcomers to the community and especially in these days of...
Are your community food servers trained to instill confidence in your residents during these extraordinary coronavirus times?
Some food servers don’t seem like they are trying to give genuine personal care and aid to the comfort of the older people they serve, yet that is what they are doing. If they love their job, love the work they do, and care for the older people they serve, it appears...
Do you know what the value of your food serving skills are to the company?
Many stories of many kindnesses being extended to a customer come to me in many different ways. The stories aren’t always directly related to Long Term Care or Retirement Living, but the idea of kindness stretches from one station to another. For instance, a father...
Does your administration notice and express gratitude to your food servers for the great job they are doing?
In these trying times of the COVID 19 crisis, studies reveal Long Term Care communities with ample staff who are well-trained have fewer cases of the Coronavirus. Training is a keyword here that works for your food servers who hold vital positions in the community....
Do your food servers know their value is the first step to loving what they do?
Open and honest discussion is essential, and for me, an anticipated part of my training session of Kind Dining®. I don’t use a formatted script for this, and I am often pleasantly surprised by the responses that come. I recall a teenage dishwasher/busboy in one of the...
Are you a food server today?
If you are employed in a senior or assisted living community and serve a beverage to a resident, you are a food server. If you only fill in on a day when your dining rooms are short-handed, you are a food server. If you only serve food on an occasional basis, you are...
Do your residents’ mealtimes reduce unintentional weight loss and dehydration?
Personal stories about food service, whether they are restaurant-based, institutions, or more often today, come from residential communities. One story that came to me recently was from a gal who probably was a natural leader in the senior community she worked in...
Do you continue your education every day?
It seems multicultural and multiracial items are in headline news every day. Retirement living and long term care residents are more multiracial and multicultural than in the recent past. Today’s retiring seniors are widely traveled and exposed to other cultures by...
What are you communicating without realizing it?
Looking at it from a resident’s point of view, after their own grooming, followed by waiting for hours for their next meal, what do they see when you enter their room? Can they rely on an enthusiastic “Hello, Mr./Mrs. …, How are you doing today?” Can they see a smile...
What is your body language saying?
“When I entered the store, with my mask on,” a lady was telling me, “I was terrified! Everyone looked so weird and scary hiding behind their masks. This was all new and looked so very strange. I took a deep breath. This is life today, I told myself. Then I truly...
Do you build relationships with hospitality one meal at a time?
Many positions covering a wide range of skills are open in nursing homes and assisted living communities now. These include a new position created as ‘room service attendant’ in response to in-room dining resulted from necessary physical distancing. The positions may...
New guidelines: Do old rules apply?
Gail has been a food server in a senior living community for fifteen years. “Our community service team donned masks and closed communal dining early in this pandemic” she reported. “But we still lost some of our food serving team because they were afraid of taking...
Do you realize improvement is an ongoing process?
A friend of a friend told me her 12-year-old daughter was creating greeting cards while being at home during the pandemic. She handed them into a local group who were passing them to a local organization. They were creating connections by sending cards, drawings, and...
Does your community continue to pursue improvement and efficiency?
When regulations introduced meal options for residents in senior living communities, it brought changes many thought were going to be costly and difficult to adapt. It has actually proved quite the opposite. Handwritten food orders that were often misread and produced...
Since 1994, the organization has supported its clients by enhancing the dining experience and ensuring the nutritional care of residents.
Learn more at www.DiningRD.com