UW Madison Week #7

Four Lakes Market

Monday:
I worked at Four Lakes today with Nick Ruppel who is the student employment manager. He is in charge of discipline, some payroll, and scheduling. They have a four tear discipline process where they get policy reminders for some violations, verbal warnings and written warnings for others. He works very closely with the head supervisor students at Four Lakes. He had me sit in with them for a while to learn their daily tasks which include mild discipline, general employee scheduling. One of the head student supervisors, Tony, has been working on creating a share point site to easily get information to employees. He spent a lot of time developing the site and I found out later he won an award for it. The student supervisors have a lot of responsibility from scheduling other student employees to basic discipline. Tuesday:We got to work with Denise again today to finish up some projects we have been working on this summer. We had to pull all of the nutrition information for sodas on the fountain machines. This proved to be somewhat difficult as the information was not readily available from Pepsi and when we asked for it they said the nutritionals for the post mix used is not for public knowledge. We ended up using th e information for the bottles and calculating the information for the 16 and 22oz cups used in the dining facilities. We worked beside her intern Joe to get the nutrition labels and ingredient lists for products currently used in the dining hall. These needed to be printed and kept on file and any allergens need to be added to CBORD.We also did a unit sanitation tour in Gordon where one of the health inspectors gave us an overview of what they look for on an actual inspection. A lot of it was about temperature control of products being cooked, held, or chilled. There are also specific ways everything has to be stored and they look for compliance in that way too. On a routine inspection a unit manager will usually walk around with the inspector. The inspector sometimes asks staff questions about proper practice in the unit. This was a very informative tour and I really enjoyed it.
At the end of the day Miranda and I decided to walk down to the union terrace and enjoy what was left of the beautiful day. It was a very relaxing way to end the day.

Wednesday:Miranda and I spent the day with the Four Lakes unit manager, Mark Gauthier. I have noticed since the beginning of our internship the unit managers are often not in the units but spend most of their days in various meetings. I have been very curious about their positions and main roles in the facilities. He is in charge of any major disciplinary action for full time staff and he also does all the hiring of new full time staff. We sat in on a meeting with all of the managers at Four Lakes. This included the ordering manager, floor managers, catering manager and student employment manager. Mark was relaying a lot of information that was discussed at the unit manager meeting the day prior. The other managers also brought up any concerns they were having.Earlier in the day, Miranda and I had the opportunity to sit in on a meeting Monica and the UW police to plan a class to teach wellness principles to some of the officers. It is a really cool program that was implemented last year. The police had the idea to do a nutrition and food portion along with their normal fitness. I really wish I could see the class in action but it doesn’t start until September.  

Thursday:

Today I got the opportunity to help with a special event at Four Lakes. We worked with Chef Damien who has been in charge of this event for the last three years. We got to do a little bit of everything today. It started with room setup in the Mendota room. The event was for a small group of girls with Phenylketonuria which is a rare inherited disorder that causes an amino acid called phenylalanine to build up in your body. People with this disorder can only consume small amounts of protein.

The meal served was vegetable based and we served some products that are specifically made to contain low amounts of protein. We made homemade naan bread for them using lopro flour.

 During service we got to meet some of the girls and see how specific they have to be about portions. After they left, we did a quick clean up and had to reset the room for a large event happening the next morning.

Friday:Miranda and I met with Cathy Ness today to learn more about unit management. We went over IDPs which are individual development plans. Each full time employee has an IDP to set goals for their future development in dining. We went to a meeting to hear about some of the changes that are going to be happening with the HR redevelopment. They focused on designing new position descriptions for hiring. They need to be more focused on activities and skills than tasks. We worked on making a new position description for the chef position. Because of the HR redevelopment, there is currently a hiring freeze so the sooner the position descriptions are made the better.Cathy explained how important documenting staff interaction is especially when it comes to discipline. She also told us about how difficult it is to effectively communicate with staff. A lot of the information she gets in meetings has to be passed along to all the employees at her unit. She passes the information to her unit management team who helps her get the information to full time and student staff members. The student supervisors are in charge of reaching out to most of the other student workers.At the end of the day, we met with Julie Luke to finalize the details for our presentation next week. She had some ideas on ways we can improve the presentation but she was pretty impressed with what we had ready.