Woodbine Entertainment

Andrea Mead

Take a moment and see if you can relate to this experience. You're in a grocery store, and you can't find one of the items on your grocery list. You find an employee and start describing what you’re looking for, but before you’re finished, they have already walked away from you. They look back, and you realize they are expecting you to follow, so you quickly catch up and realize that they have taken you to the wrong item. You let them know that it's not what you are looking for, and before you can start sharing the bit of information that’s integral in finding the right item, they’re already gone. 

Or how about this one? You’re in a restaurant, and you can tell the staff is busy and likely short a person or two. Being the kind person you are, you demonstrate your patience and are happy to wait. Eventually, the server comes and takes everyone’s order. When the food arrives, you receive the incorrect meal. You voice this to your server, and they begin to tell you that you’re wrong and you ordered exactly what you received. You turn to the people at your table and ask, “Did I?”  To which they reply, “No, you ordered something different.”  Regardless, you eat what you were given because if you put up a fight, you might break your server.

These examples, plus many others, are quite common for me these days. It’s been years since I worked in operations serving the public, but I can still appreciate the challenges that have always been there and the new challenges that present themselves in a post-pandemic world.

As an L&D professional, I enjoy looking at my experiences as new data points to help create or deliver new and useful content. Observing humanity, interactions between employees and customers, trying to find the manager and see how they’re interacting with their staff, contemplating why I’m experiencing what I am, and then trying to determine the root issues. To me, life is a fascinating human experiment!

“As an L&D professional, I enjoy looking at my experiences as new data points to help create or deliver new and useful content.”

What I'm finding post-pandemic is that, for the most part, humans are struggling. For anyone who worked during the lockdown, you likely were working with minimal human and financial resources, learning to be more resilient and resourceful yourself. Once the world started to reopen, people had gotten used to literally running in order to accomplish everything that needed to be done. Running directly into one of the most common expressions and, unfortunately states of being today, burnout.

The examples I gave above aren’t unusual situations. Quite common, actually. But the reaction from the employee had all the same calling cards, aka stress response – fight or flight. When a person feels threatened, their body releases the stress hormones cortisol and adrenalin. This gets your body ready to fight or run like hell. But when you're working, those two responses aren't usually appropriate, so you learn to cope. Unfortunately, coping usually translates to ‘react and react fast.’  The problem is this reaction happens quickly and without much thought, which has the ability to negatively impact the guest experience, employee experience, and ultimately, the bottom line.

So, what can learning professionals in the corporate world do to help? We need to give employees and managers permission to slow down! A very wise mentor once told me, “Sometimes you need to slowdown in order to speed up."  What does this mean exactly? It means a slowdown in what you're doing in order to think, and this will speed up productivity and results in the future. And remember, the opposite is also true; if you speed up now, you will likely have to slow down later to clean up the mess you’ve left because you didn’t take the time to think critically. When you work in operations, slowing down feels so wrong sometimes, and those are the times usually when you need to slow down the most. We all need to take the time to pause, think and plan our next steps. This we can support through training.

Here are some things to consider when building this into your lesson plan:

1. Always have a goal that your training is enabling the learner to achieve.

2. Identify where and how the learner needs to think critically. This is where we encourage the pause, to think, and to use good judgment. This is when they're thinking.

3. Identify the leadership behaviors the learner needs to practice in order to complete the tasks appropriately. This is who they're being.

4. Identify the tasks that the learner needs to know how to do in order to achieve the goal. This is what they'll do.

Thinking, Being, Doing. When we can support the creation of the habit of thinking, being, and doing, we enable our learners to pause and respond, moving them out of the habit of reacting. When a team who serves the public steps into this way of working, not only does this have the potential of stabilizing and improving the guest and employee experience, but it also has the potential to improve the mental health of the person choosing to respond. This is because it’s creating a habit that doesn’t allow the stress response to occur. When we pause and think, it gives us the opportunity to be rational and know that asking for help to look for an item in the grocery store isn't threatening. Or saying you received the wrong meal isn’t threatening, so the threat response isn’t required. 

As we live our lives, being served by our amazing frontline workers around the world, keep things in perspective as to how their day may be going. Moreover, if all else fails, live by the words of American philosopher Eric Hoffer – “Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind."