ARE TRADITIONAL FOODSERVICE ORGANIZATIONS READY FOR ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE? (A CASE STUDY OF IMPLEMENTATION OF ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT IN A WORK PLACE CANTEEN FACILITY)

Abstract

Eating at work will increase in importance for companies of the future. This is attributed to canteens’ role in the image that companies project, in the companies’ tremendous responsibility for the health of staff and as an employee incentive. Because of social changes, canteen will be able to gain a new role as competitor to the traditional retailer by organizing the purchase of groceries via the workplace and by supplying ready-made meals to take home. Alongside these developmental tendencies, demands are being made to acquire the ability to pick up on impulses, analyze them and through involving staff convert them into organizational initiatives within the organization and finally, to have them converted into specifically permanent initiatives for the organization. When it comes to outsourced foodservice, this task is manifestly a management affair. When it comes to traditional in-house organized workplace, canteen things are different. In these cases, the foodservice organization is bound by their peripheral status at the edge of the company landscape, and their opportunity to adapt to demands of the future is different from when it comes to the specialized foodservice operator. Here learning is a watchword and in order to investigate this claim, a case study was carried out of a development process in a traditionally organized in-house foodservice organization. The development process was related to implementation of environmental management in the organization. This present case shows that the ability to learn is an important feature for an organization that is going to be capable of reacting to challenges from the outside world in an efficient manner. By efficiently backing up the learning processes that come with the process of change, the organization can increase its collective knowledge. Individual learning processes take the form of processes that are set in motion by influences from the surroundings, after which the organization seeks to analyze them and transfer this knowledge into specific actions and then act upon it. The present case showed that traditional in-house canteens, given appropriate assistance, are quite capable of meeting such organizational challenges as in this case, environmental management. However, organizational development needs to take place to be able to meet other challenges in the future. Results show that the principles of the learning organization make a good theoretical framework in order to understand this type of organizational development. The distinctive features, which other comparable foodservice organizations can attempt to build into their organization to their own advantage, are summed up with 10 distinctive guidelines for the learning foodservice organization.