Internal Hospitality

Co-hosts Stephenie Medina and Chef Adam discuss corporate dining, culinary services and food related topics. Episode 2 explores why gratitude and small efforts of thanks and recognition to our colleagues make all the difference in creating a positive work culture.

Episode 2 Podcast Transcription

Hello everyone and welcome to Episode 2 of our podcast Stirring the Pot, I’m your co-host Stephenie Medina, Communications Manager at Flagship Culinary Services and I’m Adam Weiner also with Flagship Culinary Services I’m the Director of Training and Development. Awesome well we’re here number 2. In our first episode we talked about hospitality as it relates to customer service and so I was thinking we could talk about hospitality as it relates to internally and how we treat one another.

Lets Talk About the Weather?

Well Stephenie know what I think I’d rather talk about the weather. Ok, alright. Because yesterday I was walking across the campus at Menlo Park and I complimented one of the gardener’s how great everything looked and he went back to me and he said you know it’s a beautiful day outside everybody should enjoy it. It’s so beautiful and I thought you know as strangers we will talk about the weather to each other we will tell anybody it’s great day it’s beautiful outside, but when we work with people we sometimes forget to tell them about the great things that they’re doing. We forget to compliment them we forget to tell them oh my gosh thanks for making all the chocolate chip cookies I really appreciate it. We forget to say this Paella was excellent. We forget to say thank you for helping clean up yesterday. You know I appreciate that extra effort we got all got out of here on time because of your hard work. We forget to say those sort of things. We’ll compliment people on the weather. Ok but we won’t compliment them on what they’ve done to make our lives a little bit better a little bit easier. So internal hospitality. So internal hospitality! You got me there all right ok.

Internal Hospitality!

Internal hospitality you know we work on treating our guests very well. Yes. We work very hard at that and we’re really good at treating our guest very well, but we’ve got to be equally good as treating as others as well. Agreed yes absolutely and I think that we do a really good job of that here, but you do bring up a good point about. We get we move so fast and sometimes just you know using your analogy stopping to smell the roses a little bit stopping to compliment someone would what really goes a long way.

Well you know where I came up with this was a while back I was at a lecture and the person speaking said who in the room is proud of their kids. And every single hand of course goes up in the room. And then he says okay put your hands down. He says now who in the room has told their kids in the last six months or a year that you are proud of them. You look around the room as what about three or four hands that went up and his point was that we are so busy finding the bad things and caught and telling people about the bad things that we forget to tell them about the great stuff.

Giving and Receiving Compliments Go a Long Way

One of the phrases that I really rather not hear is we’re gonna hold somebody accountable. I don’t that I guess if that’s really necessary okay but I’d rather take that extra effort to find something that I can praise about everybody. I’d rather be walk up to somebody and say thank you very much for this or I really appreciate that or something of that nature that I’m worried about you know are they you know gonna be held accountable to me. I love that. And you know that reminds me of actually something that happened to me personally recently where my boss just stopped to kind of go out of her way to compliment on a job well done. Something that had been presented internally that kind of made it up the ladder and my might change the course of you know how we do marketing and planning in the future for the company. I was kind of having a ho-hum day until I got that call from her and after hearing that it just it made me feel great. I had a little pep in my step and and you know just that small comment, that small gesture to say hey great job on this. It changed my course of my day for sure.

You know I don’t think anybody seriously is going to say sometimes I get too many compliments at work. True, True. We need to look for those moments and they’re there. What we could say to somebody thank you very much that was great. If the chocolate chip cookie as I said earlier it’s really good say something. If today I went off to one of the cafes and the Paella was just amazing and even though they’re in the middle of service. I went over to the side of the line and just yelled out to everybody. This was amazing your Paella was amazing your and I listed off several of the other dishes that were incredible. I said thank you so much for making this for me I really, really appreciate it. You could just see the smiles and that everybody looked at somebody went back to take the moment and say this was great. It’s not difficult to do it doesn’t take very long of course it’s free.

I think this we all need to do it more because you know we need to take care of each other we do we’re Flagship we all work together and we need to take care of each other as well as we need to take care of her I guess. That’s true and in preparation for this topic that I knew we were going to talk about. I actually today made a conscious effort to go to a colleague today and give them a compliment on a job well done and it was wonderful not only seeing their reaction but it also made me feel really great to know that I had lifted them up in some way. So yeah we’re always talking about the guests and how we want to treat them above and beyond but I do think it’s really important not to forget to treat each other just the same.

The Hospitality Challenge

So I think probably should wrap this up with a little challenge. So if you’re listening to this over the next five days start with just one thing a day that you could say to somebody thank you very much for or congratulations on or this was really great and just do one a day and see what happens. So the other fund is kind of a side of that is that notice that the more compliments I start getting other people maybe it’s all self-serving but the more compliments I start getting back so let’s see if you do five in the next five days if you get five back. Challenge accepted, alright everyone will that wraps up episode 2 thanks so much for listening we will see you next time.