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.

Photobucket, Technology, Etc.....

As I was about to write this next post, I read a comment post asking how I feel Facebook, LinkedIn, and how technology is such important in our workplace. This got me thinking. If the Internet crashed, I strongly feel the Wingteam wouldn't be in business, as I'm sure this is how most of you feel about the places you are currently working. Every day when I enter the office I check my emails, post items on different websites, upload pictures, and create and send documents. I really don't know if my job would be around if technology wasn't as advanced as it is currently.



One thing that Wingteam offers is a slide show of the photos of staff members that will be working a particular event. This is sent to our client so they have to face to put to a name and someone to recognize when they walk in the door of the event. I feel that this is very helpful and important to our clients, and before today, something that I didn't think much about.

I would say that well over 90% of Wingteam's business is done online...the few other items are handled on the phone. Overall, I feel that learning more about Facebook, LinkedIn, Photobucket, and all the other technological resources that I have been working with and learning is going to turn out to be a huge asset to me throughout my future....We just have to keep learning and keep growing!

I've Found My Niche

It seems to me that I've gotten into my niche at Wingteam. Recently my only projects have been working on grids and doing payroll to the staff that just worked the event. Finally I have mastered an area of the office!

Just to explain a little.....For each event Wingteam (me! :)) puts together a grid. This grid contains the name, contact information and a little bit about each staff member that would make them suitable for the job. This information then gets sent to our client. It has become my job to go through each staff member's resume and find pertinent information that relates them to the job they will be working. This all gets put together in an Excel spreadsheet and then sent to our client.

For payroll each staff member that has successfully completed their job has to send a time sheet via email. From this we take the hours and the rate and find out how much to pay them. I then record this, write a check, fill out a thank you card, label and stamp the envelope and send off the card. This sounds easy enough but for some reason many staff members don't follow through completely and we have to "track" them down to get the time sheet.

I really like this part of my job, it lets me virtually meet the staff members that are working events all over the country and find out the awesome jobs, endeavours, and such that they have been involved with in the past.

Testimonials

I have been given the task of supervising all of the testimonials that we receive and publishing them on Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn and then relaying all of them to our website guy who then publishes them online.

Some of the challenges that I faced in doing so was more so technical difficulties than anything else. For example, I'm not very familiar with working on LinkedIn so it was difficult to figure out how to post 4 to 5 testimonials. Also, LinkedIn has most of their text space extremely limited which didn't give me the adequate space to post all of the testimonials so I had to resort to making a slide show and publishing it on Wingteam's LinkedIn site. All in all, it worked out very well and Yvette was happy with the final product.

Also, if any of you out there have problems with LinkedIn in the future, I can answer some of your questions! HAHA.

Moving Along....

Last week was a chore, literally. We had to organize and pack up the office because Wingteam was moving their office to a different location. While moving we were able to take a break from the day to day projects we have been working on, which was nice, and able to get some fresh air in the process!

While going through things it got me more acquainted with the office and also with the organization of everything which hopefully will help me become more productive in the future and take less time to find a certain paper. Who knows, but it was nice for a little break! :)

Application

Well, here I am, finally writing in the blog again. It has been a while because it has been pretty busy in the office but we have been working on so much. This post I am going to focus on telling you guys about the application that I created.

Two weeks ago Yvette came to me with an application from a restaurant that she picked up and said that she really liked the format and the content that were in it and she wanted me to tailor it to our company, revise it, and send it to the guy who does our website and have him post a link to it online. Wow, was that a project! But, I did awesome! The application turned out looking just like the new one she picked up that she liked and I incorporated some awesome stuff into it that really works for Wingteam.

I have come to find out that I really like to be given my own project and for me to just run with it. Don't get me wrong, I have no problem working in groups, in fact, sometimes I prefer it but with projects such as this I really enjoy the fact that I can point to that document and realize that I did it all on my own.

Supplier Diversity

This week our team discovered something very interesting....supplier diversity. This is a program that many companies participate in. This program gives minorities and women more opportunities for increasing business. To apply for this you need to be a certified minority business through the state. Many companies have online applications but some have to be filled out and mailed in. Once submitted you are then in their database and you will then be more likely to receive their business. If all works out well and we are able to submit our information to many of these companies our business could increase up to 200 percent! I find this project very interesting and hopefully we can increase our business!

What's to come....

This next week at the office should be fun. Yvette and I talked about many assignments I have to work on this week while she is out of the office. One thing that I am in charge of developing is a Facebook site for all of the upcoming interns that are in the classes behind us. This will help Wingteam to coordinate a larger staff base and also for TDM students to get their PLE hours easier. It will also show students a wide range of events and help them to narrow their scope as far as what they see themselves doing for their internships. It will be nice to have freedom, develop a plan of action, and hopefully make this a successful site for current ASU students.

Also, this week's assignment on assessing the competition got me thinking about improvements that I want to suggest, most of which include web site changes. After looking at some very strong websites I have a lot of good ideas to suggest to Yvette, who is already planning on redesigning the site this summer. I think she'll be very pleased with my ideas!

I hope everyone has a great week and learns a lot at their internships! Have fun!

Payroll

With the Super Bowl and 2008 coming to a close there is a lot of paperwork to do.  Recently my boss and I worked on payroll for the Super Bowl and made an invoice for Gameday management who was our client for the Super Bowl for the past two years.  It went so well! It is rewarding to know that not only am I learning about tourism and the staffing and transportation end of it, but also how to pay people that I hire!  Also, since tax season is coming up I have been assigned to help manage and organize the information from 2008.  A lot of work and time has went into it so far, but it is awesome to see it come together in such a seamless format that is very basic, and easy to understand.  I know it will help in a month when all of the payroll information from 2008 is turned in to our accountant.  I can't wait to see what project I am assigned to work on next.  All I know is that I will learn a lot from it and have fun doing so!

My Internship So Far....

My internship has been nothing but exciting and fast paced so far.  At Wingteam we staff events.... anything from sporting events to meetings and conventions for large companies at some of the amazing hotels we have across the valley.  We even have started to expand more to other states including Florida and California.  Since we had staff at the Super Bowl and the Tucson Gem Show it has been crazy in the office working on all the various projects.  The Super Bowl went extremely well, better than any of us had really planned.  The Tucson Gem Show is also going well so far, and we should get more updates about it closer to the end.  We have also staffed other events including the FBR Open and a meeting for Case IH (International Harvester) where we did arrivals for the group and also helped send them on their way for their departures.  I have really enjoyed working in the office so far, there is something new every day and I truly feel like I am helping and making a difference in the office running smoothly.