One of the major themes at this year’s Association for Healthcare Foodservice (AHF) conference was employee engagement. Foodservice operations of all sorts have seen issues with labor—getting qualified employees and keeping them—and several speakers addressed these issues.

When Jennifer Larson was asked to take over the nutrition and hospitality services department at Gundersen Health System in La Crosse, Wis., the first thing she noticed was a staff morale issue. “We knew we had to change the culture in the kitchen. When we went in there, the thing we didn’t see was smiles,” she says.