Meetings

While interning at the Island Hotel, I have been fortunate to be able to attend some fun and exciting meetings. Some of which have included:

 

An all employee meeting.

 

Human Resources puts this on once a year (I am lucky it came while I was here!) They hold two different ones during the day so that if you work morning or night, you should be able to attend one of the two. They were both held in the ballroom and I was able to go to the morning meeting which started at 10:00am. When entering the ballroom there were cookies and drinks available for us to choose from and Human Resources gave out tickets with numbers on them for the random drawings they would be holding during the meeting. Our General Manager started the meeting thanking us for coming and started to give away some prizes which included gift cards, tickets to events at the hotel and even an hour long massage in the spa! I wanted this one really badly but did not win unfortunately :(. The meeting was translated in Spanish by one of our executive managers to everyone in the audience. It was a good way to have the meeting together with all employees (Spanish and English speaking), and very interesting to hear our meeting translated into another language. The meeting mostly focused on how we are doing as a hotel compared to our competition and as a whole, as well as promotions and other things we are doing to have people come in and spend money at the hotel. The hotel also recently updated our mission statement, and vision to include ten standards that we need to implement in everything that we do.

 

Holiday Meeting:

 

This meeting was to have everyone (the Food and Beverage, Marketing and Sales and Catering departments) understand upcoming changes and promotions that the hotel will be implementing for the holiday season this year. There will be changes in decor for the lobby and restaurant and around other areas of the hotel as well. We do something called a holiday village where our pastry chef makes gingerbread houses to be displayed and companies "buy property" or purchase different sized houses to display their company logo on. I think this is a cute way to raise money for our charity (toys for tots) and for other companies to get involved with our hotel and give back to the community. We talked about hour budget and theme for this years client holiday party that we have every year. The holiday party is a way for us to thank our top clients by giving them a great party to mingle at while having some holiday fun.There is a lot to prepare for before the holidays and we start planning and brainstorming ideas as early as July and this meeting is a great way for us to regroup and get the job done!

 

Safety Meeting!

 

Once a month our safety committee holds an informational meeting and someone from every department of the hotel must attend. They talk about safety measures taken and procedures that need to be followed. Everyone is allowed to give suggestions on ways to improve the hotel to make it a more safe place. They also talk about injuries that occurred in the past month. Departments are paid a "safety incentive" when no one from that department is hurt, this makes employees be more careful while they are doing their jobs and this helps the hotel from paying expensive medical bills. An issue talked about this month is that employees seem to be more prone to injury when they are assisting in a department that is not their own. They do not necessarily understand how heavy somethings are or some obstacles that may occur while they are working. A solution to this problem was to make sure if you are working in a different department you understand these risks, and feel comfortable saying you cannot do certain tasks. We also discussed how to stay safe and healthy this season. With the flu going around, the hotel wants to make sure employees are taking the proper per cautions to stay healthy and are not coming into work if they are contagious. The hotel is also providing all employees with a free flu vaccination that will come to the hotel early November. I thnk that the safety meetings are a very good idea in order to keep everyone happy and healthy.