Reflection On Work-Related Activities: Key Lessons And Challenges

Part 1: Reflective Practice

Part 1 Reflective Practice

People consulted in relation to your placement (internal and external)

In order to get a job in the company I have consulted with different people from the external environment of the organization, some of them are related to the company and some are not. It is essential to have an idea about the place where I am applying for the job. The post I was looking for was the Food and Beverage associate. I have consulted with my friends who have relevant idea of the field. It is important to gather information on what type of job is usually allocated to an associate in the food and beverage industry. They have the experience and with the help of their knowledge, I am going to get the idea which will be beneficial for me to get the job. Apart from that, I have consulted with my family members who have an idea of the job type.

In order to get the core knowledge about the activities that are performed by a Food and Beverage Associate in Hanson Pizza, I have consulted with the HR department employee of the organization, which is an internal part of the organization. Apart from that, I consulted with a Business Associate of the company who has a good internal connection with the management. The main recruiter of the company also talked to me and he clearly stated the responsibilities that are going to be given to a Food and Beverage Associate.    

Reflection on your placement

I was given a date of interview for the post and I arrived on time for that. The given date was 10 of July, 2018 and the venue was the restaurant. The ambience of the restaurant was good and it was full of positive feeling. I was asked to wait for some time and the recruiter came without delay. The name of my recruiter was Miss. Monika. The interviewer asked me about the job experience I have and the kind of work I am capable of doing. Apart from that, the interviewer asked me about the future plans and we had a good session where the interviewer gained knowledge about myself and also stated the type of work a food and beverage associate has to do. After the interview, I realised that the entire process was good and the possibility of getting the job is high. As expected the offer letter came on 11th July, 2018. The authority asked me to join for the post from the next day.    

Part 2: Focus of Report

Goals and activities

The main goal of mine is to work in an assiduous manner to have a proficient development in the career. It is seen that the management was looking forward to have some development in the organization and in this regard they have planned a proper way of approach (Morel, Hardouin and Pottier, 2018). I had a delicate role there. In the beginning, I was trained by the professionals and my work improved from the joining day. The management tried me in every segment where help was needed and it was quite hard for me to learn all those things. In the end, I realised that it is making my skills sharper and in this process, I am going to be a competent employee. I have worked with the backhand them, the management, the customer service providing them and many others and gained proper knowledge from each of the segment. My competitor was me and I was taking my responsibilities on a serious note.

My goal was to have a proper idea of the entire functionality and in this process, I have gained the information and my goal was reached. It is important for me to have a competitive skill and the management trained me in a manner, which is going to make me prime competitor for others in the same field in the coming future (Hall and Davis, 2017). In this venture, I learned about myself and I found that I am capable of doing various things. I rediscovered myself and I found the potency which lies in my can make a considerable difference during my performance in the professional section.    

Reflection on any relevant operational and/or management activities

There have been different activities in which I participated in by one of the most important aspects which I prioritise the most is the group discussion sessions. The group discussion session is important for any of the team members because this makes the people aware of the organizational policy, which is going to be started or running currently. The opinion of all the employee’s matters for the management and I learned that the management thinks about the employees more than anything else. It is one of the best things that can be considered as a positive side for the company. This ensures that the management is giving the people a good kind of ambience to work on. Apart from that, I get to know about the issues that the employees are facing and communication process develops in this manner.

People Consulted in Relation to Your Placement (Internal and External)

The management always ensures that the employees stay open about their issues and it is one of the most interesting facts that I have discovered. The management prioritises positive work culture and that is why the reviews of the organization are good among the employees and others. The group discussion also enhances the communication skills of an employee. Being a new employee I was not that much convenient but the group discussions helped me to have a better grip on the organizational functionality and organizational culture.    

Interpersonal or communication activities

The organization has the capacity to give service to 65 people at their place. There are 30 assiduous members who are working proficiently in order to get the jobs done. Therefore, the communication process is important for the management and the employees. The ration gives a data that one employee gets to serve to people at a time. The communication process needs to be updated and according to my analysis, the communication process was the best and reliable (Van Quaquebeke and Felps, 2018). The organization relies on modern technology but there is no sign of negligence to the primitive methodologies. The verbal communication and telephonic communication is flawless and the way the employee reacts to the orders is phenomenal.

The telecommunication is the first thing that I learned. Bookings for different purposes are taken with the help of telecommunication. Employees contact each other in the time of urgency. The main aspect is verbal communication. All the 30 employees of the restaurant are not of the same ethnicity but the language they use makes communication convenient for each other. I learned that in some cases they also use sign language to communicate and this makes the entire process of customer satisfaction easier.    

Challenges faced

In the beginning, I was sceptic about everything. I consider this as my weakness. The most of the time I was thinking that I will do some mistake and they are going to terminate me from the job. The possibility of error was high because it is a new segment. Apart from that, I was not ready to work in a different part of the organization from the first week. It made the learning process slow but I adjusted in the ambience. I found that I was unable to handle the stress and my judgement skills are not competent. I found the solution also and it helped me a lot.    

Reflection on Your Placement

Prevention

I was thoroughly supported by the team and the management. The communication and connection between me and others were impressive. I am a teamwork patroniser and it helped me a lot in overcoming the fear of losing the job. The team supported me in every segment and they helped me out understanding the issues and how to minimise them. This made me confident about my actions and in a shorter time, I learned all the necessary things. I get easily adapted to any ambience. The pressure of learning was immense but in a shorter time period, I learned everything and that made a huge difference in my decision-making skills and learning skills. Soon the pressure became adjustable and I started to feel normal in the stressful situations. Thus I conquered my weaknesses as well.    

Future plans of activity

I have learned different interpersonal skills and knowledge from the above activities so that I will implement my overall skill and knowledge to improve my performance leads to achieve the interpersonal as well as corporate goals (Bratianu and Vatamanescu, 2017). At the same time, I want to open my own business in future and to maintain and gain competitive advantages it is important for me to implement different business management strategies to manage the day to day workforce in an efficient manner (Schöttke et al., 2017). My interpersonal and proper communication skills also help me to expand my business in other potential markets leads to improve financial position and organizational brand image.     

Part 2 Report

The organizational functions

Hanson Pizza is one of the popular pizza bar restaurants in Woodville North, Adelaide. This organization also operates its business through online and people can choose and order the products directly from the websites and the delivery boy of Hanson Pizza also provides fast services that generally grabs the attention of many customers.  This company also provides the customer with fat-free and gluten-free food products and that also grab the attention of many customers leads to improve organizational financial profitability as well as brand value (Cappella, 2017).  The vision of this organization is to expand the business all over the world and become the world leading restaurant brand. This organization also believes in teamwork, the loyalty of guests, trust among the employees and respect everyone it generally helps this organization to preserve its own culture that provides the employees proper job satisfaction (Tang, 2017). The management team also maintain the working environment perfectly and also maintain proper hygiene. The flexible food items of this shop are very popular in the local communities so the number of the loyal customer is very high.     

Goals and Activities

Effectiveness of the organizational structure

The management team of the restaurant also have various responsibilities to manage the regular workforce in an effective manner.  The major responsibilities of senior management are to evaluate the organizational performance and make the decision to recover or improve the organizational position (K. Smith et al., 2017). The human resource managers generally recruit the candidates, measure the performance of all the employees and provide training to improve interpersonal skills to achieve corporate objectives. The sales managers have the responsibility of marketing and promotion to increase the number of sales and the sales managers also build good relations with customers to earn their trust.  At the same time, the operational managers also manage the day to day organizational operations and gather feedback from customers to improve the service and product quality further.  For that reason, the proper organizational structure is necessary for all the business organization to divide the overall responsibility equally.

Mintzberg Model

Mintzberg model signifies the different roles and responsibilities of an organization to manage the day to operations in an effective manner. This model also helps the management to create a more efficient culture in the workplace leads to improve overall working excellence as well as organizational position (Sadovykh, and Sundaram, 2017). As per the viewpoint of Mintzberg, there is five perfect organizational structure such as simple structure, Adhocracy, Professional bureaucracy, Machine bureaucracy and divisional structure. There are few managers and workers in the simple structure organization but in professional bureaucracy, the professional worker works independently based on their specific skillsets.  At the same time, the machine Bureaucracy signifies that each department is accountable for their own work and the overall decision-making process is centralized (Mintzberg, Raisinghani and Theoret, 1976). In case of divisional structures, diverse workforce is deputized among the divisions. In Adhocracy, there are no specific structures in the organization and team members generally fulfil corporate objectives for sustainable organizational change. The Hanson Pizza generally shows the machine bureaucracy structure because all the teams have their own responsibilities but the decision-making process of this organization is centralized.     

The effective organizational structure enables this company to arrange the foods of 65 people at a time rapidly (Kartha, Fowler and Fraser, 2017). It generally indicates high performance and high working abilities of each and individual employees. The major strength of this organization is active teamwork and cooperates with other employees, managing the guest complaints in a polite manner; adaptability of work etc. generally provides the organization high competitive advantages during market operation.  At the same time, the employees of this company are not able to handle the tress properly and lack of proper judgement generally creates chaos in the organization and it also hampers organizational brand value.     

Reflection on Any Relevant Operational and/or Management Activities

Tensions and interaction between the sectors

In 1983, Henry Mintzberg projected a vital concept about organizational basic structures that divided into six main segments such as a strategic apex that indicates the executive committee members and the final decision makers of the company. The middle line indicates the Administration that manages regular workforce and operations (Mintzberg, Raisinghani and Theoret, 1976). The key function of operating core is to supply the products for effective marketing operations, the technostructure indicates the advisory committee members and the main tasks of this section is to deliver diverse innovative ideas for sustainable organizational development. At the same time, Supporting staffs play the vital role in managing regular corporate activities as well as daily operations. Apart from that ideology signifies the regulations and corporate governance of the organizations. These basic six structures generally offer the organization extra flexibility leads to manage the whole organization perfectly.     

Majority of the business organization faced competition in the operating market and without competition; an organization is unable to recognise is self-position (Anderson and Dees, 2017). The market competition in the food and beverage industry is very high so that senior management takes the pricing, product, place and promotional strategies effectively to gain more competitive advantages in the potential market. High market competition helps the management to handle the work pressure easily. It is important for Hanson Pizza to provide the customer offers or discount coupons to attract them (Rahim, 2017). The operational manager needs to gather feedback from every customer for the further product and service development. In this regard, managing 65 customers at a time is not easy for the management but adapting working environment, proper motivation to the employees, dealing with daily problems also increase the self-confidence of each and individual employees leads to improves overall organizational performance. One of the main objectives of Hanson Pizza is to provide customer satisfaction and the senior management of this company also trying to coordinate with all the department and it will help managers to handle the pressurize situation smoothly (Hopkin, 2018). This organization has 30 experienced staff members who update themselves regularly by using different upgrade technology it also helps them to enhance the experience of each and every customers.     

Conclusion

Based on the above report it has been identified that different interpersonal skills such as proper communication, coordination, teamwork, effective management ability also provides the employees huge opportunities to improve the overall business position.  Understand the basic objectives of Hanson Pizza are vital for all the employees to achieve personal as well as corporate goals.  At the same time, self-evaluation of the organization such as identify the strength, weakness, upcoming opportunities and threats also helps the organization to make the effective decision for sustainable organizational development.  Management ability and interpersonal skills of Hanson’s employees also help me to select my own objectives that will provide me different opportunities in the future.     

Interpersonal or Communication Activities

I also get different ideas from the each and individual department of that organization and the overall management and working skills also help me to set my own goals that are urgent to get success in the future. Identification of self-position also helps me to recover my own position and to mitigate all the issues efficiently. It is important for me to adopt all of the above highlighted interpersonal skills and that will help me to get success in my career.    

Conduction of the assessment needs proper analytical data which is relevant to the chosen organization. There are many cases where it is observed that a wrong methodology selection changed the outcome of a report (Schöttke et al., 2017). In this context, the selected methodology for research is primary and secondary. In the primary research method interview related result and reflective data will be provided and in the secondary research method the company oriented data will be presented in a report format.

The primary data will be given in a reflective format and with the help of the secondary data, a proper analytical detail of the company will be derived, which is going to portray the internal functioning and lagging areas of the company. In this case, the selected organisation is the Hanson Pizza, one of the best pizza providers in Australia.    

References:

Anderson, B.B. and Dees, J.G., 2017. Sector-bending: Blurring the lines between nonprofit and for-profit. In In search of the nonprofit sector (pp. 65-86). Routledge.

Bratianu, C. and Vatamanescu, E.M., 2017. Students’ perception on developing conceptual generic skills for business: a knowledge-based approach. VINE Journal of Information and Knowledge Management Systems, 47(4), pp.490-505.

Cappella, J.N., 2017. Vectors into the future of mass and interpersonal communication research: Big data, social media, and computational social science. Human Communication Research, 43(4), pp.545-558.

Hall, J.A. and Davis, D.C., 2017. Proposing the Communicate Bond Belong theory: Evolutionary intersections with episodic interpersonal communication. Communication Theory, 27(1), pp.21-47.

Hopkin, P., 2018. Fundamentals of risk management: understanding, evaluating and implementing effective risk management. Kogan Page Publishers.

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Kartha, R.R., Fowler, M.W. and Fraser, R.A., 2017. Comparitive Study Of The Organizational Structure Of Engineering Student Teams And Team Effectiveness. Proceedings of the Canadian Engineering Education Association (CEEA).

Morel, A., Hardouin, J.B. and Pottier, P., 2018. Interpersonal Skills Among Fourth-and Fifth-year Medical Students: Validation of an Assessment Tool. Simulation in Healthcare, 13(2), pp.88-95.

Rahim, M.A., 2017. Managing conflict in organizations. Routledge.

Schöttke, H., Flückiger, C., Goldberg, S.B., Eversmann, J. and Lange, J., 2017. Predicting psychotherapy outcome based on therapist interpersonal skills: A five-year longitudinal study of a therapist assessment protocol. Psychotherapy Research, 27(6), pp.642-652.

Tang, H., 2017. A Study of the Effect of Knowledge Management on Organizational Culture and Organizational Effectiveness in Medicine and Health Sciences. E-urasia Journal of Mathematics, Science & Technology Education, 13(6), pp.1831-1845.

Van Quaquebeke, N. and Felps, W., 2018. Respectful Inquiry: A Motivational Account of Leading Through Asking Questions and Listening. Academy of Management Review, 43(1), pp.5-27.

Sadovykh, V. and Sundaram, D., 2017, January. Decision making processes in online social networks: A comparative analysis of health and financial online social networks. In Proceedings of the 50th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

Mintzberg, H., Raisinghani, D. and Theoret, A., 1976. The structure of” unstructured” decision processes. Administrative science quarterly, pp.246-275.