Creating Coffee Monsters

My recent rhetorical situation has been training new hires how to make coffee at Reunion. Over the past two weeks I have trained seven employees how to make coffee, six out of the seven having no experience making coffee before and five of the seven having never worked a customer service job before. Reunion lost a majority of its employees to graduation at the end of last May, and due to this, we are being forced to train about thirty employees in all. I had to use language, body language, and written text to train these employees by showing them how to use the coffee machines, registers, and how to make every drink.

I was constrained in a couple different ways, the most significant being time. Most employees only had 2-3 hour shifts to learn an entirely new world, and I was forced to show them everything in this little amount of time. This made me speed up my actions; however, I couldn’t go too fast or the employees wouldn’t be able to comprehend and remember everything they were being told. I took time into account and decided to create a cheat sheet for the employees that included all of our drinks with their perspective recipes and amounts of each ingredient.

I wanted to have a positive affect on the new hires; because I know learning something like this can be rough as I was new to coffee at this time last year. I wanted the new hires to learn quickly, but correctly, in a way that made them feel like they were doing well. I used a lot of positive reinforcement and constructive criticism to achieve this. Another technique I used was letting them dive right into the job. I would give a quick demonstration and then let them try it out, so they would get hands on experience, as this is how I learned the best when I first started working.

My actions seemed to be successful through the actions of the new hires. I trained them all throughout the week before school started, and watched them slowly improve. During this time they asked a lot of questions and I was always sure to give the best answers I possibly could. Towards the end of the first week they were beginning to pick up on drinks and starting to remember techniques that Reunion uses. By the end of last week, the new hires were on their own, having fewer questions, and remembering drinks without having to look at the cheat sheets as much. Today, I worked with one of the new hires and she was able to man a register by herself during rush without asking any questions or making any mistakes. It seems to me I am a successful trainer and faced the rhetorical situation correctly and effectively!