I am sitting here, facing my laptop, thinking of what to discuss with you all in this edition and my mind goes to my secondary school alumni meeting which I attended over the weekend.
We hold it every last Sunday of the month; it is my job to ensure that everyone gets refreshment. So, I signaled the first waiter I sighted and asked out of habit what their platter of small chops costs.
It had increased by N500!
So, I, also out of habit, asked for a discount of some sorts. He was a new staff, I presumed, because I had not seen him in the two years we have been holding our meeting there. When he looked unsure of our getting a rebate, I requested he apprised the supervisor of our request and get back to me.
He disappeared for more than 25 minutes and only reappeared when he was making a beeline for a customer who, apparently was leaving without having paid his bills. I walked up to him and asked about our request for discount and its attendant feedback which had not come.
He dismissed me by saying he asked an old waiter to attend to us. Hello, sir… how about my request for a discount? Long story short, he had not gone to his supervisor and neither had he asked the ‘other waiter’ to attend to me, because the ‘other waiter’, when accosted, looked askance at us when she was confronted.
I went ballistic on them!
While I upbraided them, the supervisor on duty appeared and after she got the gist of the matter, she gave this evasive, untrained and lacking-in-common-sense waiter what I call ‘the eye!’ She came to our table to apologise to us and her excuse was that the waiter was new!
Was that supposed to be an excuse? Was he not trained when he resumed on salient issues like customer service, customer feedback, etc.?
 | You see, the issue here is that businesses these days recruit staff and detail them to their duties without proper onboarding, including a well-rounded, comprehensive induction training. The only ‘training’ new staff members get, like this bar in question, is how to ensure customers pay before they leave! Let’s talk about the banks for example; since they adopted the services of contract staff, banking experience has gone from bad to worse to worst to… ‘worstest’ (is there word like that? I wish!). They come, not half-baked, but not baked at all. They are simply not trained! |
A teller posited once that he will not honour a cheque because the signature opening the cheque was not signed in-between the double diagonal lines designated for making cheques cash-payable.
Ha!
As an Executive Trainee of a bank in the year 2001, just fresh out of NYSC, I was taught in the bank’s training school I got employed in, that when you sign twice anywhere on the face of a cheque, it is open for cash!
Has that changed?
It hasn’t; some banks will honour a cheque with two signatures anywhere on the face of a cheque, while some others will not. Sadly, too, some branches of a bank will honour such cheques while other branches of the same bank will not!
This is what you get when dealing with untrained human capital. As an entrepreneur/business owner or team lead, when your team members are untrained and display that they are bereft of basic knowledge of the organisation’s products and operational policies, they:
- Embarrass the organisation
- Reveal a weak and inept management
- Repel existing and prospective clients and customers
Training staff may not immediately generate revenue or income but in the long run it does. If they are duly trained (and motivated), numbers 1-3 will not obtain, which will in turn earn income and profit for all stakeholders.
I made a presentation to an association of hospitality business owners once; many of them were weary of their staff turnover and thus, were not keen on the training programme being sold to them. They reasoned that if they channeled funds to train these staff members, they usually left at the end of the month and that for them would be a waste.
My counter-reasoning was this: if they all sent their staff on the necessary training programmes and they (the staff) still left and pitched tent with another organisation within the same locale, they (the business owners) were sure of, at least, still getting trained (recycled) staff.
In the same vein, if you are reading this and you are neither an entrepreneur nor a team lead, it is your responsibility to constantly develop yourself. Do not wait for management to send you on training; send yourself, if they are not. It is for your good and the good of your own business, when you eventually branch out on your own.
Am I making sense?
dGrammarQueen Stella Nnodi
@dGrammarQueen
Abuja – FCT
