Danger Zone

Getting buy-in from a 16-year-old is not easy, especially when you’re talking about something with all the glamor and excitement of microorganisms. It’s not made any easier when you’re attempting to get buy-in with something hokey.

In the food service industry, food is supposed to spend as little time as possible between the temperatures of 40 and 140 F. Bacteria love these conditions and grow exponentially in them. Thus, it is very important to minimize the time food spends between these temperatures if you are trying not to kill customers.

Unfortunately, someone decided that this temperature range should be known as the “Food Safety Danger Zone.” Anyone who has ever seen Top Gun knows why this is a bad decision. Emulating popular culture can be a powerful tool when the right subjects are used in the right way. But Kenny Loggins is neither.

Even as someone who understood the importance of keeping food out of the “Danger Zone” I always wanted to eject from the conversation when this subject came up.

Sammy the Sweeper

At one of the restaurants where I worked, the training manuals would present shift routines from workers with names like “Sammy the Sweeper.” There was nothing worse than reading this to a 16-year-old and simultaneously trying to tell him that he needs to take his job seriously.

I had the opportunity to discuss this with the manual’s writer and she explained that it was an attempt to make them a bit less dry, possibly even a little fun. And while I will happily admit that overly dry training material is just as bad for getting buy-in as lame material is, one should take care to avoid talking down to young employees.

If you treat your young people like adults who need information, they’ll behave accordingly. You might even be surprised by the interest they show otherwise dry material. Likewise, if you treat them like children who need fairy tales to be interested in their jobs, you shouldn’t be surprised when staff meetings that don’t involve sock puppets are a struggle for your young staff.

CDs for Sale

During the orientation class I taught for one company, we had to show a video the company had created for the class. Unfortunately, this video was one of the cheesiest things I’ve ever seen. Its single worst quality was the music that played in the background - it could not have been worse. It was like a bear had eaten a recorder and a keyboard and puked them up in a recording studio.

As the facilitators of the class, my co-workers and I knew that trying to present this music as anything other than the atrocity that it was would be suicide for our credibility. So, we did the only thing we could: we made fun of it. As the video began its second or third scene, we would inform the class, usually to muffled laughs, that the soundtrack was for sale after orientation was finished.

As a general rule, the people teaching your orientation should have bought in already. So, when they’re making fun of the material, you know something is wrong.