Creating a strong team of employees is a meaningful investment. With time, intention, and care, even the busiest leaders in residential living communities can develop and engage a supportive, motivated team that makes daily life in the workplace smoother and more rewarding for everyone involved.
Recruitment and retention depend on having an environment where employees can thrive and grow in the workplace.
A 2025 article featured in The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety reported that one in five healthcare workers trusted their leadership “very much.” Additionally, over 97% of participants acknowledged that their relationship with leadership in the workplace affected them.
Therefore, it’s your job as a leader in a residential care community to step in and provide support and guidance to help your team succeed. Let’s go through how trust, transparency, and teamwork can help engage your dining staff.
Building Trust Through Consistent Support
As a leader in residential care, it’s your responsibility to offer consistent support for your staff when needed for job responsibilities. However, everyone has a life outside of work, which impacts their performance. Sometimes, you may need to step in and offer additional support. When you show compassion and understanding for your team, it builds a sense of trust, which ultimately inspires your employees to show up more fully and confidently in their roles.
Treating everyone equally is another important component of delivering consistent, caring, and person-centered support. While it might seem like a no-brainer to treat all your employees the same, it’s easy to get swept up in the day-to-day operations and unintentionally give more time or attention to certain team members.
It’s more than getting employees to “believe” they are being treated fairly and consistently; they have to wholeheartedly trust you to provide them with an environment where they feel respected and valued. Here, trust will naturally grow.
Practicing Transparency by Communicating Openly
Individualizing support is only the first step in empowering your employees — transparency is the second. Practicing transparency through open communication helps dining staff to stay engaged and committed to your team.
Be honest about your challenges and explain the “why” behind your decisions.
The more open you are, the easier it will be for employees to empathize with you. If there’s a challenge happening in your kitchen, be honest about it and explain to staff what’s going on. Break down performance statistics and provide clear feedback when needed. This also helps you stay audit-ready!
In addition to being honest about challenges, providing as much detail about the choices you make as leadership also builds trust. When staff understand why you’re choosing to implement a new policy (and they’ve contributed to developing it), they will feel more valued and appreciated in the workplace.
Open communication also extends to community residents. Obtaining resident feedback through town hall meetings or comment boxes creates valuable insight that can be shared with dining staff, bridging the gap between the “why” and “how” of your decision-making process. It helps staff develop empathy for residents and better understand their dining experience.
Hold regular team check-ins and performance reviews for all staff.
This is your chance to share staffing needs, upcoming events, menu changes, or other things that impact the entire dining team. Performance reviews are another way to provide feedback to team members, from the wait staff to additional leadership. When you hold everyone accountable, there’s little to no room for anyone to feel singled out.
Strengthening Teamwork Using Collaboration
Lastly, introducing collaborative strategies to strengthen teamwork is essential for empowering food service staff.
Sometimes, collaboration is best initiated by taking an individualized approach. To truly strengthen your dining staff, take the time to learn each member’s unique strengths, communication styles, and career goals. For example, some staff might prefer hands-on culinary training, while others might feel more confident after receiving customer service coaching or cross-training in different kitchen stations.
After you tailor opportunities for strengthening skills, use the individualized plans to create a collaborative team strategy for improvement. For example, you could:
- Facilitate staff-wide educational trainings to enhance shared knowledge and team support
- Restructure the way you host staff meetings to make staff more comfortable and encourage open dialogue
- Begin a peer mentoring program to help employees develop better relationships with each other and allow them to mutually share their expertise
Collective goals are another way to help your dining team succeed and build trust. During team meetings, you can integrate the resident feedback you’ve gathered with staff knowledge to establish community-wide goals.
Finding a Food Service Provider Who Manages Effectively
Now that you’ve got the skills to strengthen your kitchen team, it’s time to find a food service management partner to help tighten up the rest of the loose ends in your dining program.
At Culinary Services Group, we’ve got the resources you need to support finding a creative and innovative way to: develop new menus, hire competent staff, brainstorm new ways for training your team, and consistently deliver outstanding dining experiences for your residents.
A member of our sales team is ready to walk you through each of our packages and help you find the right food service management support that’s right for you. Schedule a time to talk with them today!
