University of North Dakota: Building up employees as the foundation

If you want to get a lot, often you must give a lot, too.

The University of North Dakota foodservice leadership expects the team to provide a high level of service to guests, so they’ve built a culture of investing in their people, particularly over the last year.

This includes a new, extensive student leadership development program with a mentorship component between full-timers and student team members—adding to offerings like upskilling opportunities for staffers, food safety certification classes beyond required levels, vendor cooking demonstrations and more.

“It’s important to us that our staff see and feel that we invest in them as professionals,” says Dustin Frize, associate director of dining services. “The overarching goal is showing them we understand our best resources are our people. We're going to provide you with the skills you need to give our students the best dining experience possible.”

Their efforts are noticed not only by staffers and diners, but also industry groups. The team recently won two National Association of College and University Food Services (NACUFS) awards: a bronze for Innovative Dining Program of the Year award and silver for Employee Development Program of the Year.

Connecting, supporting and launching student employees

The team employs only about 80 full-time staffers and about 50 part-timers who work to serve across the 14 foodservice locations at UND, so the 150 to 225 student employees are essential to keeping the operation running, says Food Service Director Orlynn Rosaasen.

“We looked at what we were doing previously and felt that we needed to really step it up,” Rosaasen says of prior student development efforts.  “We’re so dependent on our students for our operations, and we needed to develop strong leaders who could truly supervise.”

Rosaasen and other senior staffers asked the student leaders at the time: Where are the struggles? What makes your job difficult? The students shared that it’s sometimes tough or awkward for peers to supervise peers; they didn’t always feel comfortable correcting issues or taking a strong leadership stance.

Through these conversations and additional discussions among senior staff, Rosaasen and his team built a comprehensive Student Leadership Development Program launched last school year.

It starts with a week of classroom-style training on various leadership skills: conflict resolution, time management, supervising others and more, which continue on a periodic basis. Student staffers also set two SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Bound) goals they hope to achieve by the end of the leadership program.

But perhaps the most impactful aspect is the 1:1 mentorship of each student employee. A staffer is assigned to each student, and many of these pairs meet at least twice a month.

“A lot of the conversations end up not having anything to do with the day-to-day here,” says Frize. “As they get to know each other they start getting into general life topics—how to improve in their lives and set good examples, which does ultimately translate into how to serve people better.”

For other operators seeking to create similar programs, Frize recommends keeping in mind that not all staffers or students are extraverted. Providing videos to watch and questions to discuss together serves a dual purpose: imparting information, sure, but also serving as an icebreaker.

“For some, it’s just not comfortable to sit across the table from someone, like, ‘Oh, what are we going to talk about today?’” Frize says. “We gave them the tools right in front of them to start the conversation and it helped tremendously. Once they break the ice, they start to form relationships. And before you know it, they’re stopping in on a day they’re not working to tell their mentor about their biochemistry test yesterday.”

While the icebreakers are often structured, the point is to unlock a mentor/mentee relationship that isn’t bounded to UND or even to foodservice.

“We didn’t limit it to conversations about this specific workplace for a reason,” Rosaasen says. “We tell our students that the skills you're learning here are not just for dining services. They’re for a lifetime, no matter where you end up working,”

At the conclusion of the leadership program, student leaders are celebrated in a recognition ceremony that includes a certificate they can use to begin building their résumés. This recognition is important to the students, Frize says, and it helps garner buy-in for the program.

“It’s really led to students taking ownership,” he adds. “They gain that power and knowledge to become better leaders who get better results from their employees. We've seen increased organization, increased communication.”

Students leaders who complete the student leadership program are celebrated at a recognition ceremony. | Photo courtesy of UND Dining Services.

Prep school

To tap into development needs for full-time staffers, the leadership team looks in part to UND’s two executive chefs who watch for opportunities to re-skill or upskill.

They and other leaders spend time over the school’s winter break to reflect on how the entire department can improve. Sometimes it’s about adding skills: both internal and external experts, like vendors, lead presentations about knife skills, plant-based recipes, halal meals, menu creation and regional food trends. Other times, it’s about taking a pause to review standards and processes.

“The big ones are following our recipes and understanding our production records,” Rosaasen says. “When you get rushed, especially with the staff shortage in this industry the last few years, it’s really easy to start taking a couple of shortcuts—like putting steaks in a combi oven instead of the grill.”

Intentionally taking out time helps stop little issues like these quickly, before they snowball into entrenched habits.

Some employees show interest in the business side of the operation, too, and Rosaasen is happy to oblige them.

“A lot of them express interest in understanding our profit and loss statements, our budgets and related things, so we’ll spend time reviewing these items with them,” Rosaasen says. “It’s not part of their job responsibilities, but if they’re interested in understanding these things, it’s important to us.”

It’s about building up employees, whether they’re there for a semester or a lifetime.

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Get to know University of North Dakota’s Orlynn Rosaasen 

See what’s in store for Rosaasen’s operation, which was named FSD’s August Foodservice Operation of the Month.

Q: What are your goals for the operation in the coming year?

Our goal is to continue to improve upon our service levels, which means coming out of the gate at the start of the semester—operating at peak efficiency and service levels. That can be hard to do when you're hiring new students and you have such turnover in the student [employee] ranks. But we aim to provide that level of service that the students want and expect right from the start.

We also have a couple more unattended markets coming on board this fall, so getting those up and operational is going to be important to us.

Orlynn Rosaasen | Photo courtesy of UND Marketing & Communications

Q:  What is it that makes your operation excel?

My team has a clear vision of what we want to accomplish, and they’re on board with that vision: seeing it and living it and breathing it. We want every student, every customer who comes through our doors to have an exceptional experience—not just a good experience, an exceptional experience.

That means we need to address anything that’s a hindrance to that vision. And it means everyone has the autonomy in their area to say, “You know, this isn’t working right, and we need to change it.” I can't stress enough the autonomy that they have to run their locations. They feel ownership of what they’re doing.