by Cindy Heilman | Leadership, Resident Centered Dining Service
Your food serving team is the most powerful segment of the senior care community! Their work responsibility begins long before the salad is washed or onion is tossed into a pot. Your registered dietitian might be busy researching and choosing foods for individuals who need particular attention to what they can and cannot eat. They are designing meals for residents recovering from illness or physical disability for added nutrition selected for healing. Dietitians and other Nutrition Professionals are very passionate about food. They work closely with your Chef and Food and Dining Service Directors.
Menu planning to satisfy the many different palates and tastes and preferences of your residents; finding sources for fresh vegetables and fruits, the best meat suppliers, and other foods get the chef’s attention before even thinking about firing up the stove or filling a pot with water. Chefs are very passionate about food. They also work closely with the other chefs and cooks in the kitchen.
Food preps do the chopping, slicing, dicing, and preparing foods to ready them for the chefs. They need to be dexterous, energetic, and stress-free. They are very passionate about food and often are there to gain experience too, hopefully, become a chef one day.
Assistants and helpers fill in other necessary jobs in the kitchen. The best are reliable, efficient, and skilled at maintenance. They are also passionate about food. It is why they choose to work in the kitchen. By now you know this is a unique team of workers that ready the food for the servers to deliver to residents either in the café, dining room, or their private quarters at least three times a day. Since culture change requirements suggest keeping the kitchen open, the kitchen must be manned at all times.
All of these people are highly skilled. When the results of their efforts are favorable, word spreads and the community will attain a high occupancy. The quality of food and its presentation often is the only promising difference when a potential resident is searching for the right place to call home.
With a top team preparing meals and snacks for your residents, you want to have highly skilled food servers from all departments delivering these wonderful meals. Your food servers are the bridge not just from the kitchen, but from the community to the residents. It’s vital they use their developed skills to gain trust, open communication and build relationships.
Kind Dining♥ training sessions are now available online and on-demand using training modules that are divided into 3 sections. The Foundation of Service, (1-3), the Nuts & Bolts of Service, (4-6), and Polishing Service (7-9). The series takes approximately 8 hours to complete. The curriculum has recently been approved for 11 hours of credit (CEU), including 1 for Ethics, from the Commission on Dietetic Registration. Allow yourself or your wait staff to become passionate about serving food that was prepared in a kitchen full of people passionate about food.
Be♥ Kind Tip: Allow your wait staff to become passionate about their work.
by Cindy Heilman | Leadership, Resident Centered Dining Service, Retain Staff
It’s a tragedy when older adults are turned away from becoming part of your community, not because you have full occupancy but because there are not enough staff to tend to them. Occupancy in long-term care communities has dropped drastically recently. Often the lack of good training is the reason for some employees to leave a community, especially if they have not been a member of the staff long enough to build a commitment to the residents, other employees, and the company. Kind Dining♥ training courses show the way for new employees to find their purpose in their community through education and practice. Developing good work habits and learning to give and receive help from fellow employees builds relationships in the workplace. These actions add to a person’s enjoyment of coming to work each day. They build self-confidence and nurture the desire to do better. This leads the employees to love the work they do. It will also lead to learning and extending kindness to their coworkers and the residents they are in contact with each day.
For employees who have been members of your community for a long time, participating in the Kind Dining♥ training refreshes their work ethic, introduces new ways to work smarter, and with intention, and creates bonding with other team workers. Training is vital in keeping your staff from leaving to search for a better company that invests in them by way of education.
When an excellent training program is available in the company, it will attract candidates who want to be part of your community. The pandemic has shown a lack of good candidates to hire, but a new generation is now seeking to enter senior care. It benefits your company to show why this young generation would want to be in your workforce. Kind Dining♥ training modules are now available online. We will help you to keep your food servers, your newly hired employees, and all your employees to be an educated, invested team. A well-trained team helps your community to stand out from all others with employees who have learned to be dedicated to their work.
Be♥ Kind Tip: Invest in your employees by way of a good training curriculum.
by Cindy Heilman | Build Communities of Belonging, Leadership, Resident Centered Dining Service
When talking about the travel we did when being much younger, my friend, who prefers traveling solo, and has since she was 14 years old, told me about a time flying to England 40 years later. When she boarded the airplane, she settled in, delighted to have made early plans to get the window seat. It wasn’t long before her seatmates, a mother and a young child sat down. The woman looked all around, hoping to find three seats together so her husband could join them for the long, seven-hour flight. He sat across the aisle, a row back, in the middle of two grumpy-looking, complaining men, on either side of him. My friend, remembering how important it was for the family to be together when she was young and married, offered to move. She would exchange her precious window seat so the husband could join them.
Keeping an eye on all her passengers, as flight attendants do, she came over to my friend and remarked. “That was very kind of you to give up a window seat for that family. It’s quite unusual to see that on a flight. Thank you.”
My friend just acknowledged the compliment, surprised that anyone had even noticed. As soon as dinner was over and the trays cleared away, the same flight attendant came to her row. She leaned in and handed a napkin-wrapped bottle of wine to her, the same white wine she had at dinner. “Just a little thank-you gift,” she said. “It’s so nice to see kindness.” Without any fuss, she went back to her duties.
Kindness generates kindness. What seemed a small thing to my friend was enormous to the family and impressive to the flight attendant. Of course, my friend wasn’t thinking about any acknowledgment or reward, it only seemed the right thing to do. It may have been a small thing that the flight attendant responded to, but it is still remembered by her many years later.
It doesn’t take a college degree or years of training, just a mention during the employees’ weekly discussion or training session. Remember to be kind. When one employee performs a kindness it will reverberate.
Kind Dining♥ training was designed to assist you in honing the skills not just of your food serving team, but all your employees, in building communication between coworkers, residents, and management, using cross-training exercises. These training sessions, now available online, focus on working smarter, with intention. The sessions are friendly and supportive. Change begrudging attitudes to employees who love to come to every work day. Encourage them to show kindness to all people. Take a close look at your food service team and realize how important they are to your residents, to each other, and the success of your company.
Be♥ Kind Tip: Kindness that is practiced grows into a natural way of life.
by Cindy Heilman | Build Communities of Belonging, Retain Staff
“It’s Spring! Walking in the park to find a bench and have lunch was a great idea, Kelly! I’m bursting to tell you what happened to me since we had lunch together last month. Even at my age, I’m still learning new lessons to apply to my everyday living.” Colleen said.
Kelly scoffed. “Have you become ancient overnight? The last time I looked you were a foxy 35-year-old woman.”
“Well I was only comparing it to your young 20 years,” Colleen laughed “which reminds me of what I was going to tell you. I was shopping at the grocery store a couple of weeks ago. Funny, I was up on my toes, trying to reach a box of pasta from the top shelf. Things I need always seem to be where I cannot get them. When a long arm reached over and brought it down for me. I turned and it was Brad Bevins, our basketball star from high school days! ‘How kind! Thank you!’ Those were the first words out of my mouth before I even realized it was him.”
“He said, ‘you’re welcome, it’s just a small thing to do.’ I told him, ‘It’s a small thing for you, major to me, being a shorty.’ We chatted, catching up a bit. It’s been high school days since I’ve seen him. I did hear he was in a car accident earlier in the year and I mentioned it. He said he’s recovered with the kindness of a lot of people. With time to think while he was healing, he vowed to do kind things for people every day, strangers or not. It’s sort of a pay forward.”
Kelly commented, “That sounds like our last discussion at the employee’s training session, about spreading kindness not only to our residents but to each other, too.”
I’m sure it’s one of the reasons I don’t dread coming to work on Monday mornings. It makes all the difference in the daily work we do. Being generous is infectious and it works wonders in our community.
Kind Dining♥ promotes that kindness practiced will come naturally. It is another ability the food serving team needs to add to their improvement list.
Kindnesses used expand outward to include coworkers where offering a helping hand forms on-the-job friendships. Trust is formed when coworkers treat each other with kindness.
Encouraging the Golden Rule – treat others as you would like to be treated- is a perfect guideline for attitudes toward residents and coworkers.
Employees who are trusted and treated with kindness, remain with the company.
Be♥ Kind Tip: Kindness means listening, truly listening.
