Employee Evaluation Form Waiter: Fill & Download for Free

Has the way that somebody treated a waiter or an employee ever completely changed your opinion about them?Yes. A man (or a woman) is seen in his/her true identity when dealing with someone who is doing a job like a waiter/waitress is. When you consider yourself as “the client” (who is always right, it is said) you show your true colors and attitude. And more often than not, this is where carefully built personas fall down in ruin, revealing you for the person you truly are.This is something that I take very good care about when I meet people, especially for business relations. Behaviors reveal everything. As you can see, it is a form of communication - and every kind of verbal and non-verbal communication is important to reveal, and build, the global image of the person or the company.So much that I can tell you that how you react to unexpected issues is widely used to test you out when you are applying for a job (usually at the top of the corporate ladder).You make the formal interview, and then you are are taken out to lunch by your prospective employer, and while you are at it, you experience a series of assorted service mishaps by the serving staff. Waiting too much, wrong servings, undercooked dishes, spilling wine on you… you name it.Of course, the waiter serving you is not a real waiter, but is an HR professional who is evaluating your response when subject to a stressful situation. Your comments, behavior, reactions. Everything. Generally, at the end of this ordeal, they reveal it for what it was - a testing ground.This also happens in other ambients as well. Like for example, if you have come to the interview by flying, and the corporate driver was sent to meet you and bring you to the hotel, or by the same hotel staff during your stay or when you are having your breakfast.So, always remember the two good old sayings: “Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you don’t know about. Be gentle, always”.And also, “You have two ears and one mouth because you need to talk half than what you listen to”.s a note to my readers, I mostly write about high-end and luxury objects, like watches, furniture, and design. So if you are interested in those fields, be sure to check my other answers and follow me. And a nice upvote is always welcome!If you are a Facebook or Instagram user and like watches, I curate a page/profile called “The Watchonomicon.” I am regularly publishing images of cool watches, links to articles, and other exciting stuff about horology. We also have a Telegram channel at ThewatchonomiconAnd if you REALLY like my contents about horology, and want to support my writing, you can do just that on Patreon. You will find access also to material that is not published anywhere else: The Watchonomicon is creating knowledge of watches, horology, and style | Patreon

I moved to Germany in 2011 from California to do my doctoral degree. I have been living here ever since, have met my husband here (who is German) and do not regret the decision at all.Germany has a high quality of life with excellent healthcare, education and infrastructure such as public transport and road conditions. It has a rich cultural heritage and is populated with world class museums, opera houses and the philharmonic. Berlin especially, has a thriving nightlife and artists scene and is very multicultural. The food scene is also rich with a great variety of cuisine from around the globe.The social welfare system is also very good, their is a federal law guaranteeing vacation time and most work places enforce you to take that time. I think the minimum time is 26 days a year and this time is independent of your sick days. There is paid maternity leave. There is also an unemployment system for a limited amount of time that is guaranteed to the ex-employee that is independent of their citizenship. If you held a contract for at least 1 year then you are guaranteed unemployment for some minimum amount of months which is 60% of your average salary. The unemployment can be received for a maximum of 2yrs after at least 2 years of working with a work contract. Job security is also high once you receive a job with an unlimited work contract and have made it through the probezeit/evaluation period. Unlike in California an employee can not be terminated at will.It is very easy to budget travel because there are many cheap airlines flying throughout Europe and the distances are not so great, so even weekend trips are possible. For example by plane Italy, Greece and Spain are 3.5 hrs away. It is also cheaper to fly to the US, making a roundtrip from Berlin to San Francisco or LA usually half the price as buying the same flight in the reverse order from LA to Berlin.The people are not as friendly as compared to California, India, South America and southern Europe. On average they are more reserved and it can be more difficult to break through their shells and to join their inner circles. From my experience, Germans tend to compartmentalize their lives and separate work from family life. Your true friends are not necessarily the people you work with. Outside my husband and his group of friends, the majority of my friends in Germany are actually expats from other countries. The college experience is very different here. There are not the type of campuses that exist in the US that are like little communities and provide for every need of the students life so that they never need to venture into the cities in which they are situated. Instead German Universities are more like community colleges in feel. Most students do not move away from home and instead go to the university just for classes. They retain their older friend circles and it can be more difficult to break into these as an outsider and a foreigner.The German people are also more straightforward and this can be seen as rude and abrasive by foreigners. There is also a strong lack in customer service as compared to the US, though it has improved over the years. But I have had many interactions where the checkout people are grumpy and will argue with the customer and give their opinion and attitude. The concept of “the customer is always right” has not made it here yet. **edit** As many have pointed out in the comment section, I do not advocate entitled customer behavior where they get to treat the cashier/sales person/ waiter like their own personal slave and the other has to grin and bare it. But I do not enjoy an interaction that the person who is employed specifically to sell me something or serve me acts like they are doing me a huge favor by selling me something/serving me. There is a level of decency that I expect on both sides.The education system is also very good and going to university is actually affordable. Students do not usually graduate with crippling debt that they can never shake off even if they were to declare bankruptcy. Tuition in Germany depends on the university but is usually extremely low. As an example one semester tuition at Humboldt university in Berlin is around 300 Euro and includes a semester ticket where the student can use all forms of public transport in Berlin and the immediate surroundings like Potsdam.The salary in Germany is less than in Silicon Valley but the cost of living is also much less. Consider that a 1 bedroom apartment can cost as low as 600 Euros in Berlin. The price can rise to 1200 Euros in the city center but is still much lower than in California.The bureaucracy can be a challenge but as a foreigner I have to use the bureaucratic system more than the typical German and in the end it is possible to wade through the formalities.The biggest advice I can give for someone who wants to move to Germany is to learn German. As a native English speaker, there is not the necessity to learn German and it is possible to live in the country, especially in Berlin, without learning the language. Germans learn English in school from an early age and most can speak it to some degree. However, if you want to assimilate in anyway, make friends and make the bureaucratic process easier on yourself, learning German is key. Among friend groups or in offices people revert to their native language and as a foreigner you will not be able to build that connection with a person or be up to date on office politics if you cannot communicate.Edit: I would also like to add that paying taxes is much more simplified in Germany if you are not self-employed. Like in California, taxes are automatically deducted from your salary based on which category you fall into (ex: married or single, etc.) but unlike the US , one is not required to file taxes yearly. In Germany you have 3 years to file taxes and you only would do this if you are self-employed or if you want to claim additional deductions (which I would recommend). Basically if you want money back then you file taxes if you are not self-employed.Medical care: Germany has two types of insurance: public and private. Private insurance tends to be cheaper when you are young and more expensive when you are old but also is prized more by the medical service industry because they can get more money from the private patient and are paid upfront. This leads to potentially unfair treatment of private insurance holders as they can get faster appointments and more doctor time etc. However there exists a basic level of medical care that has to be given to patients regardless of their insurance and in Germany it is quite high. Private insurance holders also have to deal with the additional headache of having to pay their medical bills upfront and then applying to their respective insurance company for reimbursements of their expenditures. If you have a bad company this can be a long and painful process. With public insurance the billing is handled internally by the medical institution and your insurance provider with some minor co-pays. For public insurance holders the standard of care is not diminished when it counts. I recently changed insurance to the public insurance plan and was then diagnosed with a condition that required surgery and this surgery was only performed by a single surgeon in my whole area. The surgery had to be performed relatively quickly and even though I did not have private insurance I was still seen by this single specialist and successfully operated on. After my experience I have also learned that it is always possible to pay for additional services or comforts out of pocket. For example I ended up paying the difference for having my own recovery room in the hospital and because the medical industry is better regulated that cost is not astronomical, in fact it was 80 Euro per night.

I'll attempt a summary definition in the abstract:A good design culture is one which (1) lucidly and accurately understands where design adds value to an organization and (2) empowers design with what it needs to operate successfully in those areas.That sounds simple enough, but it tends not to be intelligible in practice to many managers. Companies with bad design culture often fail to understand how broadly design can add value, or where; in this, they are like many companies a decade ago who could accept that "IT" was important whether you were a technology company or not.A myopia for the relevance of what's outside of your domain is hard to avoid. And while we know why the IT revolution occurred when it did, more or less, it's less obvious what's transformed consumer expectations about design. I have theories, but they're not strictly relevant. [1] Even if one can admit that design might add value, it takes real focus and commitment to empower design appropriately, given traditional ideas about what its role is.So how does this play out at a technology company?1. Where Design Adds ValueAbsolutely everyone by now knows that design is not how it looks, but how it works. But this is not merely a shopworn injunction about visual design; the real question is: what is it in this sentence?The natural assumption for basic managers —here meant in the derogatory slang sense— is that design should also control how an app flows. This is an amusingly superficial reading. A better manager might suggest that "it" means "the product as a whole," which can mean a lot, but that's still limited. (Does that include branding? Marketing? Support? All can be part of a customer's "UX" And what of internal company structures? And how new features get prioritized? Etc.).For an intelligent manager in a good design culture, "it" is unbounded. A designer —like an engineer— can bring immense value to companies in ways that are hard for managers to predict. Indeed, because both designers and engineers are creatives whose solutions to problems often have the quality of being inventive, it is a fundamental epistemological fact that you cannot predict how design or engineering can add value.This is why it is a mistake to constrain design or engineering according to inherited organizational structures. When management (or worse: a default inertia attributable to no one) does so, they design the company without interrogating the principles according to which they have done so, and without having mechanisms for falsification built-in.In other words: they design it poorly. (After all: they're not designers).So a good design culture engages in self- and organizational-evaluation: what are the organization's goals? Where and how can we add value? What can be done better? Where can smarter feedback loops be built? What data can show us where we err? Where must we be intuitive, and where must we be quantitative? And so on.Some points:Figuring out where design can add value begins with respecting an expert designer's methodology and experience, and listening to herNone of this means that designers must roam widely and add value everywhere and begin trying to design better forklifts for the crew in the warehouse. If doing so adds value, they should; if the company or designers in questions don't benefit from the broadest scope, however, that's perfectly all right: what matters is that the scope is suited to the organization and team and is regularly evaluated. (A theme of Apple's history: it's hard to know what might be important, so design everything from employee buses to the curved glass windows of your retail outlets and maybe someday, it will really pay off: serendipity as strategy).How this works depends an awful lot on the designers; if the role is widely scoped but every suggestion is an aesthetic one, a gradual contraction will occur and eventually design will be "visual design." This is a primary reason for designers and design teams to expand their talents: to remain engaged with other functional areas. But if the business is best suited by that sort of designer and design role, that's okay!Bruce Tognazzini, designer of Apple's first human interface and author of eight editions of the Apple Human Interface Guidelines, asserts that nearly any initiative at a smart company kicks off with a meeting that includes design. This could mean design's presence in many places where it has little to add, so a good design culture is one in which designers are comfortable saying nothing, "I don't know," or otherwise bowing out. That you have authority doesn't mean you must constantly use it.To employ a sports analogy: you scheme for the players you have, not the ideal set. At the same time, you don't abandon the ambition of better schemes simply because your players aren't all stars. You develop your players —and they should be self-developing too— and you iterate on the schemes.Thus: good design culture is open-minded about where design can be additive; iterative and exploratory about how design works best in the business; and always oriented towards value and goals. [2]2. Empowers DesignSo design can add value in lots of places and a smart design culture tries to find them all. But once designers are working on something acknowledged to be "their business," it's important that they are empowered to deliver.There are so many bad design cultures that one could spend hours just noting the simple and obvious ways business fails to do this. But let's ignore the most obvious cases —interfering in their workflow, making them use bad tools or a bad environment, giving them too little time, not giving them high-level goals to work from, micromanaging them, meddling in their output, etc.— and instead look at how fundamental a shift this can be for a company.Empowerment in design is largely (but not only) about two things:improving the processes of discovery, experimentation, falsification, and learning, andincreasing the degree to which designers can work independently to preserve the purity of the tested hypotheses. [3]Illustrating the first point, I'll quote from one of my favorite bits of design writing, "Designers Will Code," by David Cole. In it, he describes some aspects of Quora's design process:These systems add up to create a design process that is not only interactive and immediate, but also represented in final context powered by real usage, mirroring the end-user experience more than a mockup or static HTML ever could. In other words, you're designing the real product, not an abstracted representation.I'm not suggesting that we've found the perfect solution, or that everyone should copy WebNode and LiveNode. But I believe something similar will be the future — not designers becoming top-notch engineers, and not fully visual programming. We will instead meet in the middle: designers will become more like programmers as programming becomes more like design.So: Quora's done a significant amount of engineering work to enable its designers to work rapidly, in-product, with real data and real users; it's likely a very fast process for them to bucket test groups, see results, and iterate, largely without having to have meetings or otherwise wait, waterfall, explain, speculate, and waste time and energy.It's an example of empowering design to add maximum value. It was surely costly, but since design's value-add is directly related to its capacity to research, experiment, iterate, and find the best solutions, it is not only a defensible investment but, in my view, a mandatory one.The second form of empowerment —increasing the degree to which designers can work independently— is harder to discuss apart from semi-artistic language, but it's as true for engineers as it is for any creative thinker. Concisely: creative, conjectural work, whether scientific or artistic or whatever else, benefits enormously from intact "through lines" and suffers from excessive context-switching, constant translation, or stop-start schedules. There are many reasons for this being so, a primary one being the focus of this essay of mine: Design & Compromise.So:Empowerment begins with respecting an expert designer's methodology and experience, and listening to her about how she can be most effectiveEmpowerment varies by team and organization, but however costly it seems (or however much adjustment to traditional roles or egos is required), it is a force multiplierWe often over-focus on the empowerment of individual contributors and not on structural empowerment of design teams. If your designers could work live, in the product, and see how real users were affected by their ideas in nearly real-time, how much could they accomplish?Empowerment may require others in an organization to change how they think of their roles, too, and careless or badly-explained policies that ensconce designers-as-gods can creatively blunt the rest of a team. Designers aren't gods or goddesses at all; they're just another sort of problem-solver, like an engineer, and as aghast as an engineer would be at a non-technical CEO proposing a particular architecture, so should we be at marketing-driven design, executive-hunch-based-design, and so on.Conclusions from Bad CultureSimply put, bad design culture —when the design team isn't involved in scoping its role or isn't given a "seat at the table" during discussions to which it might be additive; or when its needs aren't respected and it isn't allowed to control how it works— is nearly always the result of simple disrespect. That is: insufficient respect for the science, practice, tradition, and impact of design, and disrespect for the practitioners themselves.Good design culture is really just affording the respect to designers and the design tradition that we afford most expert practitioners, like engineers or lawyers, and doing so for the pragmatic reason that they know best how to produce the results we're after.So in a good culture, design has a primary seat at the table to ensure it is adding value wherever it can, and it has the full support of all the other functions at this proverbial table to ensure that it is adding the maximum amount of value possible.In hunting for where design can add value, it's good to look first to areas where innovation matters, then in areas where differentiation matters; optimize for design's impact on those parts of your organization. Last, remember that design is largely about decisions, decision-making, and the prioritization of many competing needs. Thus a third place to include design: in designing business processes.Give design the authority, resources, and managerial "space" it needs to contribute value while ensuring that design work is aligned with fundamental organizational goals. At the level of ideas, it's all pretty simple; in the scrum of daily life, though, it can be hard to defend this definition, particularly in companies where design's aim —problem-solving— isn't the real aim of the organization (which might instead be focused on growing sales independent of adding value for customers, for example, or, most commonly, has no real aims that it can articulate beyond self-perpetuation).Last, a note: this is all about design culture, and I've used the word "designer" in here quite a lot. But design-thinking is practiced by everyone who tries to solve problems. A good design culture is also one which promotes problem-solving, falsification, anticipation, thoughtfulness, and a value/goal-oriented focus to everyone in a company. A good company understands where everything adds value and empowers everyone to operate optimally.It reminds me a bit of that line about manners: "If he's nice to you but not to the waiter, he's not a nice person." Likewise, if they have a good culture but not a good design culture, they don't have a good culture.Notes1. Two possible explanations: first —and I know this will strike some as silly— Apple was an incredible vector for the demonstration of design's value to regular consumers and businesses alike. After Apple, it is harder to believe that the cheapest products win, that consumers cannot tell garbage from gold, etc. Second: individuals are ever more empowered themselves in our societies, and they are less likely to simply "accept" crummy experiences in their products and services. Since design is "how things work," it might just be that people aren't tolerant of what doesn't work anymore, and they can communicate their frustrations so easily and broadly that companies cannot afford to under-design.2. A good way to frame this for those who insist on a narrow reading of design: designers are people who specialize in imagining how things seem, feel, and work in the eyes of others; they rapidly virtualize many different psychologies and use a variety of techniques to anticipate how people will react to things. This ability is useful far beyond the confines of interfaces and websites; nearly anything a company does affects humans, eventually, and including a designer as a consultant in meetings can ensure that someone is thinking about that (to say nothing of their other abilities).3. Designers should be able to work independently in implementing their ideas and tinkering with them. This is not to say that they should work alone. I believe that designers are most successful when they use research and listen to others closely and carefully; what's important is that they should be able to decide when to gather ideas and talk and when to workshop alone. We don't make musicians practice onstage, but musicians learn an awful lot from their audiences.4. As always, I am indebted to David Cole for many of the ideas in this answer, and particularly his Applied Discovery presentation from Build 2013.