FINAL ASSIGNMENT: STORYTELLING

Challenge and selection

Storytelling is one of the tools that I have used several times. Working in places like restaurants  make you get close to different people especially immigrants and some low income people who  urgently need their income to satisfy their daily needs. And this situation makes them a bit  fragile when their income is threatened. For many reasons going from low season for business  to economic recession, different solutions are considered by managers. They start from  reducing associates work hours to laying them off.

I usually refer to storytelling to motivate my team. The reasons why I often run to this tool is  that: it has a direct effect on people, you can instantly read it on their faces and their behavior.  While telling it you can observe if it is going to work or not. And when the story is told to a  group of people, it creates a kind of connection between them. It breaks cultural boundaries.  It also gives them a common reason to fight for.

Application

I have been working in food industry for quite a long time. I heard people saying that it is an  industry that is not affected by recession because no matter what, people have to eat. But my  experience in different countries shows that it is one of the most affected industries by many  crisis.

A year ago, I was working for a restaurant that was about to fill for bankruptcy. It was a very  stressful experience, especially for my team members because most of us just took loans from  our respective banks and more than half of the team were single parents. The rumors were  going around. People were affected and consequently it was impacting their mood, their work  and our profit. No more motivation as many questions were crossing people minds. Something  needed to be done to save the boat. Even if it was true that our turnover was far below the  previsions. What I saw coming up was closing our doors more because of poor quality input in  term of work than bankruptcy. It was becoming very bad when the absenteeism was increasing  and even worst when people were falling sick repetitively. I felt that it was great time to find  a solution to save the company from our hands before saving it from bankruptcy. I just recalled  my experience during some crisis and decided to tell a life story to our team.

Insight and Approach

I looked for a day in the middle of the week when most people were in the office and were  ready to listen to me I just started telling a story about my past experience when I was working  for a restaurant located in a metropolitan area. I particularly recalled one crisis due to the  recession the country was facing in 2009. We were not able to make half of the previsions for  the year, the management at the headquarter has decided to close most of the company’s  branches. Our competition (fast food restaurants) surrounding us were driving our customers  away. They made their menu heathier and added meal options. Given the fact that we were  doing a lot of work on our meals, our prices were not really competitive. It was a bit  complicated for us to be laid off out of job. Our manager and I as supervisor decided to write  a letter to the head quarter requesting from them to give us some time to improve our profit

and an authorization to make some changes in the menus. The company menu was standard for  the country it was not taking regional cultures into account. We luckily got the approval. What  we first did is to include a seasonal meal, reduce the meals portioning’s. Because our survey  from the customers show that the servings were too big. And this helped us reduce the prices  accordingly. We retrained the associates to have a better understanding about the reason why  we are at work and who is paying our bills. It was relatively easy to do given the fact that we  have seen the consequences on our pay checks due to reduced working hours. This brought back  our regular customers, helped us increase our profit and most importantly save our branch.

When I was concluding the story, I saw the light of hope and motivation in the eyes of my  colleagues and I understood that the story has done its job.

This course made me understand how better I can tell a story in a more structured way to make  it more effective. This experience helped me understand how powerful a storytelling can be  especially when it is well use

The other tool I could have used in this situation and which I will definitely use in the future  for similar situation is visualization. The reason is that it makes all the stakeholders see by  themselves what the problem is and consequently makes the problem easier to solve because  everyone knows his individual role to solve the problem.

