My first week as a Sales Intern for Holiday Inn has been an interesting experience, I have been shadowing upper management and learning the inner workings of being part management. This week we are focusing on the importance of training and relationship building. Throughout the week we’ve touched on topics such as learning types, positive and negative reinforcement, team involvement and how to build successful relationships with employees and clients. I was informed of the different learning types, visual, auditory, kinetics, and reading and writing. I find that its extremely helpful if you can evaluate someones learning style and be able to train to their specific learning type. I also learned the importance of repetition, it may seem mundane to repeat yourself but it’s how most people retain information. When we touched on positive and negative reinforcement we focused a lot on the positive, and recognizing employees and giving credit where credit is due. Holiday Inn has a GroupMe with their staff and when someone goes above and beyond whether it be the front desk staff, the restaurant staff, or housekeeping they always mention each other and acknowledge how appreciative each other are of one another. Everyone likes to be praised, especially publicly. When discussing negatives or things where one could improve I was taught to always do such things in private one on one conversations so nobody feels singled out, or feels attacked. Which all relates into relationship building, It’s important to build strong relationships with your employees/co workers so they feel comfortable enough to talk with you about issues they are having but keeping that professional boundary. Its also important to maintain trust within employees/coworkers because without trust people will lack that necessary comfortably. By maintaining those two things, your employees will most likely be more motivated to preform. I also learned about the service profit chain. I’ve attached a link, which I find extremely helpful for understanding the “whys” behind management. This week I was assigned to research with 5 relationship building activities for the employees to do at the next meeting. I will attach a link of the exercises I found that I think would be fun and helpful for the team.
Service Profit Chain