by Cindy Heilman | Build Communities of Belonging, Leadership, Resident Centered Dining Service
What are the toughest problems older adults face in their communities today?
It isn’t the lack of a swimming pool or a 5-star restaurant.
Loneliness and isolation are at the top of the list. They are two challenges that became prevalent during the coronavirus pandemic and remain within many senior and assisted living communities.
The huge loss of family members and dear friends hangs heavily on elderly shoulders. But, these dilemmas can be met and reduced by training your food serving team and employees about kindness and friendliness.
Knowing how to approach older adults with these skills and adding care to that list is not a talent one is born with. It is a learned skill.
Once your team becomes aware of this resolution and practices being amiable, it can spread to include not only residents but also coworkers and administration. Needless to say, adopting these kindness-based skills will improve their personal lives outside of the working day.
Friendliness goes in hand with kindness. Adding these skills to your training and practice sessions is imperative.
The newly learned skills will set the ambiance in any dining room. It will create warmth to the table, reminiscent of the dining room in the home they left behind.
In turn, this improves their nutrition and becomes a connection of healthcare to hospitality, harmony, and happiness. All of these words lead to the word ‘care.’
It’s what is desired most in Long Term Care and assisted living communities. Allow your employees to care about their work, the residents they serve, the team they work with, and the company they work for. Let them commit. Once employees incorporate these assets from your training and discussion meetings, they will form a desired way of life.
Kind Dining® curriculum is uniquely designed to improve the lives of those working and living in senior and assisted care communities.
Hospitality is a universal language and core to skills necessary to your food serving staff.
Remember that your dining service is central to the success of your community. Kind Dining® training guides your food servers into being your company’s most valuable asset.
A few important facts to remember for now and the future are: mealtimes market your community, residents spend 60% of their day focused on mealtimes, investing in your employees is the effective path to culture change, the organization’s success, and kindness is a healthy habit.
Be ♥ Kind Tip: Remember that kindness is a healthy habit!
by Cindy Heilman | Leadership
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
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®.
by Cindy Heilman | Build Communities of Belonging, Leadership
Investing in Your Employees is the Most Effective Way to Accomplish Culture Change
The company’s greatest asset is its people; people who are now facing change that is happening at the speed of light. Your employees need to thrive in this environment in order to meet the new demands that are coming. Employees properly trained in Kind Dining are productive, energetic, and the most important part of your growing organization. With the added knowledge of how to do their work to the best of their ability gives them a sense of accomplishment they will carry with pride. When all of your staff learns to work as a team, mealtimes will flow smoothly and efficiently creating a feeling of achievement.
Employees that know they are accomplishing what is expected of them tend to stay at their place of employment rather than seek work elsewhere. They look forward to coming in to work each day when they are recognized as valuable assets to their community. Your servers prefer to come to work rather than let co-workers have to cover for them. They know their absence causes a hardship. It’s been proven that appreciation of one’s work takes precedence over the amount of one’s salary.
Your servers, when they are happy and content with the job they do, that happiness overflows onto your residents. Contented staff doesn’t leave and you won’t need to spend money in seeking and training replacements. It is always best to invest in your present employees. Their learning to work with all segments of your community as a team, in a positive way, will result in an organization full of contented caregivers. When you have a happy, properly trained staff, it’s a win-win situation for all.
by Cindy Heilman | Resident Centered Dining Service
Truth #4 The Individual Resident of this Generation is Different
The younger Boomers are filling our communities today. A new ‘help-yourself cart’ on the side of the dining room will not satisfy their desires. Their refined palates want the variety of culture found in quality ethnic restaurants that their two-income households afforded them before retirement. They want espressos, lattes, and caramel macchiatos. Remember that they are the largest increase in population ever in our country and they are now moving into your dining room. Are you ready? Can you accommodate? Service must be as good as the food and the food needs to be the best. Today’s residents expect it and are willing to pay for it.
Kind Dining © training and sensitivity is more important than ever and will overflow into all the other areas of your community. Courtesy, graciousness, and well-timed meals, served from friendly staff, are key factors. These residents are active, social, adventurous, sharp of mind, and world educated. The community needs to step up to offer them the respect due and to fulfill their demands in everyday living. They know what healthy eating is and recognize fresh foods direct from the farm that grew it.
Residents in today’s communities are very different than the residents of ten years ago. Times have changed drastically and the government is forcing the change to be accommodated. When you understand the change, the government’s guidelines will easily become clear to you. As a people, we are aware of the different cultures that now gather in our communities and seek higher standards of service to savor it. Culture change is here. The Greatest Generation resident is nearly gone from the community today. It’s time for your best effort to shine.
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.
The younger Boomers are filling our communities today. A new ‘help-yourself cart’ on the side of the dining room will not satisfy their desires. Their refined palates want the variety of culture found in quality ethnic restaurants that their two-income households afforded them before retirement. They want espressos, lattes, and caramel macchiatos. Remember that they are the largest increase in population ever in our country and they are now moving into your dining room. Are you ready? Can you accommodate? Service must be as good as the food and the food needs to be the best. Today’s residents expect it and are willing to pay for it.