Keep up to date in your field of expertise
To keep up in your field of expertise and develop yourself and your colleagues it is important to know the latest trends and development in your industry. Not only in your knowledge of trends, but also in the know-how of your job you want to keep up! Are you ready for your guest, customer, client or patient of the future?
To quickly know what guests, customers, clients or patients will expect from you in the future there are different ways to keep up to date. To support you we give you some tips:
Trade magazines and trend websites in the industry
There are loads of free trade magazines in every industry. Ask your supervisor to subscribe so you and your colleagues can read these magazines. For example: Misset Horeca, Foodclicks, Zorgvisie, Zorg+Welzijn, Inretail, Distrifood and P&O Actueel. You did not succeed in subscribing? Subscribe yourself for the free newsletter. There are many free newsletters which you can receive daily, weekly or monthly that contain the newest trends. Therefore, check the websites which tell you the latest trends from the industry regularly. For example, take a look at www.foodinspiration.nl, www.horecatrends.com, www.foodbrigade.nl, www.zorghulpatlas.nl, www.invoorzorg.nl/ivz, www.retailtrends.nl or www.intoretail.nl. Read blogs of trendwatchers and other bloggers from your industry. These people keep you up to date in a nice and informative way on everything you need to know to be prepared for your guests expectations.
Engage in conversation with your customer
Hold regulat conversations with your guest, customer, client, patient. Is he/she satisfied? Does your organisation meet the expectations? What could you still do better to ensure that he/she comes back and passes on his/her experience? Below some questions to ask your customers:
- What is the most important condition for using our products/service?
- What do you miss within our organisation?
- What do you think about our communication?
- What do you think of our offers/quality?
- How can we exceed your expectations next time?
- Where can we surprise you with?
Keep in conversation with your team
Developments in the industry
Ensure you keep in conversation with your team on the developments in the industry. When you have read something that might be fun and interesting for everybody? Share it! To share news with each other you can use Facebook, WhatsApp groups with your colleagues or the employee app of your organisation.
Skills in your team
Discuss with your team what kind of skills are needed to perform optimally. Are all of these skill presented in the team, or is there room for improvement? Everybody has their own talent, can you learn from each other? And do you know everybody’s talent? Do you have senior employees that can be coupled with junior employees so everybody has somebody to ask questions and learn from?
Benefit from it
Being up to date on the developments in your industry is good and important. But even more important is it to benefit from it. Ask yourself this all the time: How can I make my work even more joyful and my guest/customer/patient/client even more satisfied by being more innovative? What developments do I see in the industry and how can we as an organisation and as team improve step by step? Start working with it!
Just do it!
Often, the daily operations overtake your good intention to take the time to read an interesting article. That's a pity! Try to really be strict to yourself and take the time to invest in your own development. That means: stick to the agreements you made with yourself and see your development as something important, for which you may have to say no to other things.
