Tasks, objectives, knowledge achieved

I was working as a waitress in on of the restaurants of Two Sticks restaurant chain. This company was chosen because I love this place to go with my family and friends as a customer, and recalling memories about family visits I always have seen the personnel very funny and happy, and I decided to try my own as a member of the team. Besides, one of the restaurants was not far from the area I live in.

Waiters are evaluated as key personnel in Two Sticks corporate culture and that is why the company pays a lot of attention to teaching newcomers as good as possible, giving all necessary to know. History of a company, detailed menu with every ingredient mentioned and some papers about special products with the information about the place of growing, lifecycle and frequent use of it... All this you must know before starting serving guests. It was difficult to learn all information at once, but I realized that in real life you need to have a very good and solid knowledge in this sphere I want to be successful.

Two Sticks has it’s strictly reglamented Standards, following which is mandatory and their fulfillment is thoroughly supervised. These standards include for example standard phrases to greet guests, standard questions you always have to ask, for example ask if I should repeat the drink when I see that there is less than 1/3 full glass. There are about 100 rules in this document and I also had to learn them and pass an exam to start working.

As a control of Company Standards fulfillment there is always hidden check, they are customers pretending to be simple people ordering some ordinary for a waiter dishes and behaving as a simple customer, but then few days after such visit that is always unknown for everybody in the restaurant, there comes a mail by post where that exact serving is thoroughly assessed due to standards and the name of the waiter is being written. So, we never knew if we are serving just a mother and a child or a hidden explorer. This makes us always to be attentive to the customer and never forget about serving and behaving standards.

Waiter should be open-minded, positive and always find a word to say and to make a small joke of any tricky question, even if you can’t find an answer. For me this was pretty difficult and sometimes I turned red when I did not know something what was asked, but with the time passing by I learned how to cope with this kind of situations and I think it is a very good practice needed in every-day life.

Following service Company Standards, which I was talking earlier, took a lot of attention at the beginning, but then it became normal and obvious for me so I was just doing everything right with no efforts. I think this kind of standards is very good to have in any self-respectful company because it gives a face to the company that is always clean and tidy for it’s partners and customers, with relatively low efforts (just in the beginning of employment a new team member).