Fostering Inter-Departmental Institutional Memory in the Nonprofit Sector: Borrowing Microtransaction Knowledge Strategies from a Successful U.S. Restaurant Chain
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7146/jookc.v2i1.20959Keywords:
institutional memory, nonprofit, storytelling,Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to describe practices used for knowledge storing, sharing, and gathering across a shift-based organization where narratives may not overlap among other employees. The paper uses a case study to identify nine best practices used in a successful, family-owned chain restaurant in the southern United States, and illustrate how those practices might be useful in a nonprofit organization. These practices include consistent training procedures, routine plans for mundane work, cross-cultural/departmental communication strategies, staggered cross-staff notifications, visual conveyance of information, shift reports, and weekly management meetings.
While the connection between a restaurant and a nonprofit organization may not seem readily apparent, a U.S. survey of fundraisers (n = 580) revealed the two industries have many traits in common. Both industries struggle with employee turnover, work with time-sensitive materials that require rapid turnaround, and act in highly competitive markets. I argue that the nonprofit sector may benefit from the procedures that this restaurant had in place to share the outcomes of their accomplishments and failures, and that a restaurant shift serves as a hyper-speed version of daily processes found in any organization, and that outcomes may be more readily observed due to the nature and number of events that occur between the business’s open and close. This paper aims to provide suggestion for issues of handling employee training amidst turnover, creating usable institutional memory, and building interpersonal trust among employees.
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