Awards at the Auditorium

As my loyal readers know, I worked for Starbucks before having a baby. During my tenure we had an annual growth of about 30%. What this meant for me in HR was a lot of hiring, training and promoting. Of course there was also the inevitable firing involved, but that'll be for another day.

For the entire month of April 2022 I was telling you guys all about growing, harvesting, roasting and tasting different varieties of coffee. However, today, I'm gonna tell you a snippet about the people side of the business. 

As I was saying, we were opening new stores and getting new people on board every month. The original small family vibes sort of disappeared, and we were in danger of becoming just another faceless large corporation.

One measure to prevent this was the introduction of the open forum, a quarterly held event at a hotel auditorium to connect with the employees and tell them about new developments: store locations, managers, products, procedures,... People were encouraged to ask questions and express concerns. We also used the get-togethers to give employee of the month / quarter awards.

Every event was conducted twice, so the morning shift people would attend the forum in the afternoon and the other way round. In the beginning it was two forums, one in Zurich, Switzerland, and one in Vienna, Austria. As we expanded into the French speaking part of Switzerland, there were also events in Geneva or Lausanne.

Anyway. On that particular day, I was busy as usual. Having to spend the entire day at the hotel was seriously taking time away from my many other priorities, and I took the liberty to get some work done by inviting job candidates to a remote corner of the hotel lobby to interview.

Photo by Alesia Kazantceva on Unsplash

I made sure to be back in time for the awards.

That day I recognized my training specialists who did a fantastic job onboarding each and every new "green bean" as we liked to call our new employees. I think it was also then when we began to roll out the coffee master program. So clearly, they were key people who deserved the award, and I told them so. 

When I was done, I sat down at a nearby side table, grabbed the water pitcher and poured some water into a glass. God was I thirsty! 

Photo by Julia Zolotova on Unplash

One of the store managers who seemed to be observing me, made some hand gestures and mouthed something, which I couldn't interpret.

I took a big sip and wanted to spit it out immediately. Yuck!! Geez, what on earth was this? 

He ran towards me, and he couldn't help but laugh. 

Turned out this wasn't the water pitcher - it was the floral vase. They had been handing out bouquets all day and didn't dispose of the vases.

That's what you get for drinking water while working for a coffee company ;-)

This reminds me of the immigration officer in Down Under, probably our first interaction with an Australian person upon our arrival back in 2004:

From our travels to the USA we were used to behave very formally and inconspicuously at immigration, and even though it was 4am when we landed in Darwin, and we were beyond tired, we remembered to play by the rules as we were standing in line to enter the country. 

Everything went well. No interrogation, just a quick stamping of the passports and we were officially in Australia!

"First time here?" the officer asked. We nodded. 

"Be careful, don't drink the water!" he advised hubby. 

We were confused. Nobody had ever mentioned anything about the water not being OK in Australia. Was it unsanitary?

"Water is fine for taking a shower" the officer smirked, "otherwise drink beer, mate! Enjoy your stay!"

Hahahaha! What a glorious start to our journey!

So, any water incidents you want me to tell about? Were you ever in the position to drink "floral water"? Let me know in the comments and be sure to leave the link to your post so I can visit!