Tell me you’re new, I’ll forgive your mistakes

An Indian restaurant story

The other day we were going to a new restaurant. The waitress asked which dishes we wanted. As she had a bit of trouble writing the names of the Indian dishes and asked us to repeat what we wanted she added:

Sorry, this is my first day, so I’m still learning the names of the dishes.

I have to admit, that this waitress did a few mistakes when she served us. But just because she told us at the beginning that she was a new hire it didn’t frustrate us.

Here, the waitress avoided future problems by telling us she was new from the start. That’s something that many organizations do and it works pretty well.

A similar story in a supermarket

There is a big supermarket chain called Migros here in Switzerland. New hires have on their shirt a little “L” pin, like the ones you put on your car when you are a learning driver. Next, to the pin, it’s says something like “trainee”.

Just by knowing that, as a customer, my level of patience is automatically going up. I’m not upset if things go slower than normal. The person in front of me is learning, we’ve all been there so let’s be nice.

Company culture can avoid frustrations and stress

Often as new team members, we have some weird pride that doesn’t allow us to say we are new to the company. Then it’s pretty nice that the organization culture does that automatically in order to avoid frustrations on the user side and make life less stressful in the first days for new hires.