8:41 am
As I mentioned last time, I frequent a Panera restaurant close to my office. This store is also within spitting distance of a large high school. For some students, Panera is becoming an alternate cafeteria. This leaves Mark, the manager, with a dilemma. On one hand, he wants the students’ business. On the other, he doesn’t want them to take over the store and dissuade other customers from coming in for their coffee and pasties. Continue reading “Managing Millennial Customers”
9:49 am
I frequent a Panera Bread restaurant close to my office. While I’m mainly there to get some creative work done, I can’t help but notice the atmosphere that Mark, the store’s manager fosters. Where in some establishments, the employees act as if they could give a hoot, I have yet to encounter someone on staff who isn’t friendly and caring. It’s a busy store and during certain times I just sit and watch how each employee accomplishes his or her tasks and still maintains eye contact and an approachable, if not jovial, demeanor. What Mark has succeeded in doing is promote a sense of ownership, something that seems to be increasingly rare in today’s workplace. Panera is a chain with several hundred stores, and yet Mark has made this one his own. (As I type this, he is debating the rankings of this year’s Final Four with a table full of old-timers.) So how does he do it? Continue reading “Building Ownership in Today’s Workplace”
2:55 pm
One would think that a professional football locker room would be off-limits to texting during meetings. You know — “Sit down, shut up and watch last week’s game tape.” Apparently not so. The father of an offensive lineman approached me last week during a seminar to tell me that his son spends most of the offensive team meetings texting his friends in the defensive team meetings on the other side of the wall. Kinda makes me wonder about the level of concentration on Sunday afternoons every fall. After all, if you’re being paid $218,754.30 a game, shouldn’t you be giving it Continue reading “If the NFL Can’t Stop It — Can You?”
