Memo on reflection
Memo
Date: 3/6/08
To:
From:
RE: Reflection Paper #2
Observation:
It’s been about a year since I started my new job at one of Jeff Ruby’s restaurant chains, “The Tropicana.” The job description is a Server’s Assistant or S.A. in which our job is to assist the servers to give the best service possible to our guest. Jeff Ruby basis his prices on his food by the service his employee’s offer their guest, which in this case are relatively high. My boss being the head Server Assistant, allowed me to follow him for a few nights to see how everything worked and how he acted around the table of guest. He began by telling me that “table presence,” which is how we present our self at a table of guest is a big part of our job and key to giving the high touch service to our guest that Jeff Ruby enforces. Table presence included the use of formal words such as “Yes Sir, Yes Maim, and May I,” instead of “Can I.” Table presence also included the way you present yourself through body language, say by keeping you posture straight, keeping your hands behind your back or holding them in the front. So my boss would sit back and watch me present myself to a table or two. His way of running his crew of SA’s was that those SA’s that had the better table presence and got the job done correctly and efficiently would get the better sections, which got the better tables, which in turn made the most money. If you didn’t have good table presence you wouldn’t get good sections or even worse sections if you didn’t improve.
Reflection:
I was very excited about this job because I knew that Jeff Ruby restaurants are well known in the area and had great potential to make good money, but this isn’t your typical sit down restaurant. Like I mentioned before you had to behave much differently in the way you talked and way you presented yourself when around a table of guest, than you would just hanging with friends or at home. Well I myself had never worked in a restaurant before in my life let alone a fine dinning restaurant, so I was a little intimidated by its operations due to lack of experience. So I had to conform the way I acted and spoke, to those ways of a fine dinning restaurant. At first, I was scared about how I was going to fit in to this restaurant with no experience in the field. Through watching my boss and how he did the job correctly and through my own dose of getting my “hands dirty,” I was able to catch on and offer the service to our guest that defines us as a fine dinning restaurant. My boss noticing that I had good table presence and that I was doing a good job of keeping the guest at my tables happy, he decided to start giving me better sections of the restaurant instead of worse sections. I then started to make more money because he had confidence I could get the job done correctly and efficiently.
Interpret:
When I look back at the way I learned how to present myself in a “formally,” professional manner, I see what my boss did to modify my behavior in the workplace, which is talked about in chapter 3. My boss was using the behavioral modification to get me to learn through reinforcement. Behavioral Modification is defined as a theory that explains learning in terms of the antecedents and consequences of behavior. My boss clearly explained to me the antecedents (or events preceding a behavior) and the consequences of the behavior. Although antecedents are important, behavioral modification tends to focus mainly on the consequences of a behavior, which is events following a particular behavior that influence its future occurrence. My boss wanted to strengthen, and then maintain our “formal” behavior in the restaurant. He used mainly three of the four types of consequences collectively known as the Contingencies of Reinforcement to do this. First, he used the idea of Positive Reinforcement being the introduction of a consequence that increases or maintains the frequency or future probability of a behavior, by telling us, “If you have good table presence, you will get better sections.” Secondly he used Punishment defined as a consequence that decreases the frequency or future probability of a behavior, by putting us in worse sections because our table presence was poor, so that we would learn to improve our efforts. Third, he used Negative Reinforcement defined as the removal or avoidance of a consequence that increases or maintains the frequency or future probability of a behavior. He used this once we had it down and it came natural to us, so he didn’t have to watch us he knew we were continuing to do the job that was intended without using consequences. The final consequence of the contingencies of reinforcement is Extinction which occurs when the target behavior decrease because no consequence follows it. This wasn’t really used in my case of behavioral modification because he was always giving us consequences for how our table presence was. I guess you could say it came into play when we flubbed up and he didn’t catch it therefore there was no consequence, but he did a good job at paying attention.
Future Decisions:
Going through this process and learning and the behavioral modification process, I have learned that these situations occur everyday in the work place. Whether it’s getting rewarded for your good work or demoted for slacking and not doing your job. Now that I have a good understand of the behavioral modification process, in the future I will be more willing and improve my skills that work for the business to the best of my ability, and put greater effort to modifying my behavior to fit the company’s standards. I know now that with any actions in the workplace come with consequences. I will be able to pin point which one of the Contingencies of Reinforcement the company uses for when I get an actual job for my career. This will give me incentives to perform my job to the best of my abilities because in the end all that hard work will pay off.