Own Your Workplace
Details matter, even if you don’t see it
I learned a lot from working at an amusement park. While most people think that people who operate rides are “button pushers,” I took so much more away from my time there. The things that I learned while operating these multi-million dollar machines extended from safety-focused, to customer service, to park operations, and so many other things.
One of the most enduring lessons came from a simple experiment involving a piece of garbage, a video camera, and a leadership who was intensely focused on making sure the entire experience was exemplary for all of our guests. One of the rides that I was responsible for had a camera on the ride, which meant that it had a series of display screens at the end of the ride so that people could see their pictures.
We were all a little surprised when our Area Manager called us down to the photo kiosk one day during our morning crew meeting. We dutifully filed down the ramp to where she had queued up a video on one of the photo display monitors. They were basically computer screens, so you could just plug a USB into the computer and play whatever video was on there.
What we saw left us all a little sheepish and ultimately disappointed in ourselves. There on the ground, perfectly framed in the view of a security camera was a piece of…
