At the beginning, we would like to thank all of you, more than 150 students answered the student union’s Sodexo feedback survey at the turn of September-October! It’s great that so many of you felt it was important to give feedback and we got a good sample of different opinions and views to take forward.
In this blog post, we open up a bit the whole process around this feedback survey and give a concise summary of the general observations about the feedback you gave.
The Background of the Survey
Sodexo provides restaurant services on three HAMK campuses, in Hämeenlinna, Riihimäki and Valkeakoski. It is Sodexo’s responsibility to organize an annual meeting with the customer of the services, in this case HAMK.
The idea of the annual meeting is to review operations, give feedback and development proposals from both sides, and generally maintain a good customer relationship between operators. For this annual meeting, we in the student union were asked to collect feedback from students about restaurant services. The same feedback was also gathered from HAMK’s staff.
The student union participated in this annual meeting organized at the beginning of October. We took the feedback we received from you to the meeting, as well as suggestions for developing the operation.
The Content of the Feedback Compiled
Summarizing, we could say that the problems related to the quality and availability of food emerged moderately strongly from the students’ feedback.
In dozens of feedbacks, the inaccuracy of the menus was highlighted, which leads to problems, for example, when listing allergens and special diets. According to several feedbacks, this is due to the fact that some popular dishes have already run out very early in the lunch service. In addition, the poor availability of English versions of food and ingredient lists came to the fore.
The feedback also highlighted the quality of the food is perceived to have deteriorated compared to 2022. In the feedback regarding the quality of the food, problems related to the taste and structure of the food were brought up, as well as the lack of protein, especially in the vegetarian and vegan options.
The students’ hopes were also to have more “normal home food” on the menus. In other words, the more special dishes brought with it by the latest menu reform have not tasted quite as well to HAMK students as what Sodexo thought perhaps. Let’s see if there will be more traditional Finnish home dishes in the coming year alongside their perhaps slightly more special options.
Many feedbacks also praised the varied and good menu, but even in these positive feedbacks, problems related to the adequacy of the food were highlighted, among other things.
The salad table and selection received a lot of praise from the students, but more variety was desired for the bread table.
The students also highlighted the adequacy and service of Sodexo’s staff in a few feedbacks. In other words, the problems facing the restaurant industry in general with regard to recruitment, which Sodexo also found to be commonplace, have also been reflected in our HAMK restaurants. Hopefully, the few open recruitments at Sodexo will be finished soon and the possible personnel resources will be sized correctly. The feedback also highlighted the weak ability of the staff to serve customers in English.
The feedback provided a good basis for development work
The feedback from you has been forwarded to Sodexo at the annual meeting. So the development items that have come up have been written down and Sodexo now has, a year to promote these development items before next annual meeting. We will definitely come back to the subject at next year’s annual meeting. The development work will start immediately, so hopefully we won’t have to wait a whole year for improvements to the service’s shortcomings.
Your feedback is therefore important! Sodexo is coming out with its own feedback survey this fall, which I hope as many people as possible will answer. Feedback is the best way to correct possible problems in operation.