The restaurant and hospitality industry typically trains employees in service and production, but what about stress awareness and management? Business practice has hinged on 'natural' stress tolerance and stress resistant personalities, but how many of your employees and co-workers really know what stress is from a training perspective, has taken a stress management class that describes the different perceptions people have of stress, or the functional and dysfunctional ways that people cope? How many hours of stress management and awareness learning have you or your managers logged?
In my 26 years in the service industry, including a self owned business, no one offered me any information or training in how stress operates in the workplace, or how stressful customers and clients behave. We tend to treat stress management in the independent business community morally. If you don't manage stress well, you lose your job, you get reprimanded, etc. Getting stress management out of an employee in a high volume, high pressure situation like the restaurant and hospitality rush by repression and threat is asking for failure. Of the 9 restaurant and hospitality organizations I worked for from 1996-2006 as cook, delivery driver, server and manager, only one did not have a major catastrophe that could have been avoided with seasonal learning of stress behaviors and effective situational stress management.
What do you think?
Monday, October 15, 2007
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