Food-Service-Manual-for-Health-Care-Institutions

Food Service Manual for Health Care Institutions
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• Project teams are similar to task forces and ad hoc committees in that their purpose and
duration are limited. However, the task that a project team is to accomplish may take as much
as a third or half of members’ work time. For example, the development of an eating disorders
program might be assigned to a project team so that the program can get under way as quickly
as possible. A project team manager coordinates the work of the different specialists. These
specialists must report to the project manager as well as to their regular department or unit
directors until their work on the project is completed.
• Cross-functional teams are made up of employees from about the same hierarchical level
(dietitians, nurses, pharmacists, and the like) but different work areas who work together to
accomplish a task or job. These employees work in the same organization and blend their
knowledge, experience, and talents to meet outcome objectives and goals.
• Virtual teams are an extension of electronic meetings. Virtual teams allow groups to
meet without concern for space or time. This is accomplished through communication links
such as conference calls, video conferencing, e-mails, and chat rooms. The members may be
geographically distant and in various time zones.
Work teams are useful in carrying out essential activities in organizations. Food service
directors can benefit from both participating in such teams and using them to accomplish the
work of the food service department. Such teams offer several advantages:
• They foster effective communication among departments that share common goals and
objectives.
• They permit integration of departments with similar goals and objectives.
• They offer a medium for coordinating the opinions and experience of specialists from
several different functional areas.
• They provide a forum for team decision making.
• They create broad-based support for projects that demand the involvement of several
different departments or units within departments.
Generally speaking, food service directors are required to serve on various hospital committees,
among them the disaster-planning committee, quality assessment committee, safety committee, or
infection control committee. (The advantages of team decision making are discussed in Chapter 5.)
Teams
The importance of teamwork in a participative management structure is emphasized throughout
this segment of the manual. Teamwork is important at the job-involvement level of empowerment
to help employees make decisions that affect their work group. Teamwork is valuable in
health care food service because of department complexity and job interrelationships; the more
complex the organization or department, the greater will be the return on an investment in teamwork.
For example, because many individuals are involved in providing a patient with a meal
tray, collaborating on the task provides a clear goal to be accomplished. In a complex department
like health care food service, the various sections of the department have a variety of goals.
For instance, those purchasing food see their goal as obtaining and providing raw materials to
the cooks. The cooks see their goal as preparing food for the tray line to serve. The tray line
server’s goal is to complete the tray for a hostess to deliver. When all of these members act as a
team, the goal becomes serving patients. In addition, an organization with a focus on customers
and continuous quality improvement can benefit from the ideas and accomplishments created
by teams. Risk taking also is a positive outcome of teamwork, and research has shown that team
workers are more likely to take risks than are individuals. These statements, while supported by
the author, are based on the information presented by various leaders in business and specifically
in health care and food service. (See the Bibliography for specific references to teamwork.)