Hyatt Place Gilbert

I am happy to say that I have a job lined up at the brand new Hyatt Place in Gilbert. I have been working there for a little bit and love it. Good luck to all the graduating seniors with whatever lies in front of you!

http://gilbert.place.hyatt.com/hyatt/hotels/place/index.jsp

Communication

While completing the offering a solution assignment and responding to everyone's post it occurred to me that communication seems to be the biggest problem in the workplace. Whether it be from managers to employees or from employees to managers, many times a piece of the puzzle is lost through translation. I am well aware, since this has happened to me for many many years, although I am not all too sure of how to solve the problem. I guess the solution is different for every situation. For many of the posts, the solution seemed to be as simple as keeping a daily log book or a profile about a client, but sometimes, the solution is much more difficult.

Because technology is so widely used, reading an email with directions or even just a quick reponse can be taken the wrong way. You can think the person writing the email is mad, angry, disappointed, in a hurry, or many other emotions while the writer feels the exact opposite.

Unfortunately, I feel that in today's word there will always be communication problems in the workplace, but you just have to handle it the best way you know how, or try to find easy solutions. It is something that I'm sure we all have to work on :)

TPS Reports

Hopefully someone gets the reference to Office Space! haha

Anyways, one of my colleagues at Wingteam and I have been working pretty hard on getting all of these organized, and this week, we FINALLY made a pretty decent dent in them. We have had to go through every time sheet that was submitted in 2008 and compare them with our excel file from 2008. Unfortunately, they don't match up well at all. We have entries in our excel file that we don't have time sheets for and time sheets that still have not been entered into our excel file. Needless to say this project was definitely a headache but alas!, it is almost done.

Other than that its just the usual in the office. Just finishing up the TPS reports and supplier diversity project.

Keep your eyes open...

And ears, because you never know who you will meet or when. Last week I was working at my other job, retail, nothing special, and I was helping a woman. She was very nice and somehow we got on the topic of what she does for a living. She said she was a wedding planner. Immediately I was absorbed by what she said. Turns out, at my job at the mall, I met an amazing contact. She is the Senior Catering Sales Manager at the Arizona Grand! Wow, I mean, WHAT LUCK!!! We got to talking and she is extremely involved in NACE which is an organization for catering executives. She is actually very interested in me as well because she is wanted to start a student chapter and needs to know who to get in contact with at ASU and I just happen to know the right people for her to talk to!

Well, I'm going to email her this week and hopefully we will be in the works of getting a NACE chapter started at ASU. I was very happy and surprised to now have such an amazing contact from such an unlikely place.

Here's the link you NACE. I suggest if any of you guys want to get involved in events, this would be an organization that I would consider joining!

http://www.nace.net/

More Technology...SEE! It Is Important!!!!

During my site visit Sara gave Yvette and I some wonderful information about Google Docs, http://docs.google.com/and I would like to share it with all of you. I feel that this is a very important, easy, and useful new creation that will help with many business endeavours far into the future. Basically, you have a file that many people can reach and put information in to, and you can assign and give full access to whoever you want, or deny access to many people unless they have the appropriate sign in information. This is what Sara used for us to sign up for our site visits.

Through Google Docs Wingteam and I are making it possible to do online submissions for our time sheets as well as applications, w-9's, and much more, hopefully! This will be a much easier way to complete the documents rather than emailing them to the staff and hoping that they will send them back. Now they can just go to our website, click on one button, fill it out, and submit! Then, on our side, this will ideally go into an excel file which will eliminate us having to go through every time sheet and fill out all of the information in excel (we use the excel file for tax and organization purposes).

That is not all Google Docs has to offer. I strongly suggest you guys go and check it out, it is a great tool!

Networking

Over the past 4 years here at ASU I have made some wonderful contacts, many of which I hope to utilize far into the future. Many of these contacts I gained while getting my PLE hours as well as during my internship. Although it is hard to keep in touch with these contacts on a regular basis, I plan on making a LinkedIn account and trying to add many of them to my "friends" list on there. With all of the knowledge that I have gained working on the Wingteam LinkedIn I really hope the experience helps me make a professional account that will keep me in constant contact with the professionals that I have met over the years, and maybe it will even land me an awesome job in the future! :)

I have come to realize just how important networking is. The assignment on networking was a little tedious, but I strongly feel that that excel file will keep building and will become a great resource for me.

Procrastination

That seems to be one of my biggest problems. I wait til the last minute, even with these blogs, even though I have so much to write about! The worst part is that the more time I wait before writing these, the more things escape from me that I wanted to write about.

Anyways, how this relates to the workplace. Well, there are deadlines, very important ones. I feel like I am getting a lot better about meeting deadlines at Wingteam, but ongoing projects, ones that I know I can put off for a day, or a week, I do, which is terrible. I need to be more proactive. I feel that this may be something that many of us run in to as we enter the workforce. Its kind of our generation, many of us procrastinate, which is terrible :/ I can say with confidence though that I truly am working on it. This internship has shown me that to make everything run smoothly, to have me be happy and stress free, and most importantly for my boss to be happy and stress free, projects need to be done on or before schedule.

I'm sure I will struggle with this for a while, but hopefully the steps that I have made will stick with me far into the future.