Kristyn Thielbar

Culture in the Workplace

During the summer of 2022, I accepted an internship role with Mayo Clinic Health System Event Center in Mankato. During this experience, I worked over 135 hours as a Marketing and Events intern. My duties included helping the marketing team with ticket selling in the box office on Ticketmaster, and managing the social media accounts such as Facebook and Instagram. In preparation for concerts, I helped with riders for artists. Riders are the list of requests for both the main singer and their bands. Their requests include food and beverages that must be purchased prior to the load-in on the concert morning. The rider also states the requirements for rooms and specific details about that day. On the events team, I helped with various company meetings, retreats, wedding receptions, rehearsals, and bartending at such events. I completed my internship at the beginning of September, I am now a part-time event staff that helps out with any event that is hosted at the event center. These events include managing hockey suites, wedding receptions, rehearsals, and companies that come in for meetings.

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These interactions are essential in the business world, due to the reliance on communication and professionalism in the workplace. Throughout this experience, I have noticed similarities and differences between previous jobs and my internship. I believe that the event center is a meaningful intercultural engagement experience because of the variety of events hosted and the different groups of people each event attracts. 

Changing Behavior

At my internship, I recognize my previous beliefs are constantly changing due to the differences in workplace culture. The values have shifted from learning everyone’s name and talking to build relationships with them, to making the client happy as quickly as possible to prepare for upcoming events. I find the cost of the clients’ happiness becoming more challenging due to the time limitations in the day. Sometimes the clients’ happiness also does not correlate with the company values. For example, the first wedding I worked on was a Vampire Diary theme where they had unique decorations that included skulls, dull flowers that looked like the color was sucked out of them, and the bride wore a red dress. Initially, I thought it was interesting that they did a different theme than normal, but I also thought the decorations were a little bizarre. I began to have a prejudiced belief when I was checking on the wedding throughout the night, because there were very heavy wafts of marijuana in the air. I thought to myself, this is not a good situation, I should make sure they aren’t using drugs in the building. After this scenario, I was checking on the wedding more often to make sure the bartender and the other staff were doing okay. In this example, I did not trust them as much as I did initially. I wanted to make sure I was following the rules for my company because I was fairly new to the organization, and I knew it was illegal to do so in a city-owned building.

The event center draws various people into the facility due to our variety of events. For example, our venue is a flat and affordable rate for wedding receptions compared to other companies within the area. We normally host weddings for couples relatively close to the Mankato area due to the city being far enough away from the twin cities.  Similarly, we find our target market is very limited to country and rock artists. For Country music concerts, our target age group is 20-60year old males and females which helps engage both the community and college students. Rock concerts instead target the adult population, or 40-60year old adults. From an advertising standpoint, we set our Facebook ads to run about a 50-mile radius to towns south of the cities and engage the southwest part of the state. 

During my internship, the most popular event was Rib Fest. Rib Fest is an annual event in August that is hosted at Vetter Stone Amphitheater and goes for the entire weekend (Thursday-Sunday). Thursday was the country night with Craig Morgan, Little Texas, and the Jensen Sisters. Friday was a rock night with Warrant, Lita Ford, and Fire House. Saturday was supposed to be Gin Blossoms, Gear Daddies, and The Belfast Cowboys (which were canceled due to the weather). Sunday was local bands from the Mankato area which included CityMouse and Mary Jane Alm. I believe the people attending each night were different due to the clothes they were wearing and the drinks they were consuming. Thursday night was very laid back when I was bartending, and they were drinking primarily beers and seltzers. The majority of them wore jean shorts, cowboy hats, and t-shirts to be comfortable.  Friday night was our busiest night by far and they were drinking hard alcohol. With this being said, they were very rough around the edges, and the bartenders had to limit the number of drinks they sold to people to ensure they were not consuming over the legal limit. This statement is true for all events, but we had to be extremely careful with this group due to how rowdy they were. It was also hard to understand what the people wanted. They were not very specific, and I had a hard time hearing them. The majority of them wore rock t-shirts and jeans and the ladies wore more clubbing or partying clothing. Saturday was canceled, and Sunday was very laid back due to the concert being earlier in the day with fewer people who attended. I saw more families and elderly attending this day to avoid all of the people who came for the other days. The differences between these groups of people were amazing to witness, and I never would have thought to see the differences in just one weekend.

Changing Language:

I find that communication is important in any business you are in. It is essential to know how to adjust vocabulary and language in the workplace. Recently, I helped an engineer at the Mankato Engineering school where they had a variety of different ethnicities from all over the world. There was this man who did not speak English as his first language, but he wanted help with the vending machine. When he asked me for help, I changed my vocabulary and used hand gestures to help him get the drink he wanted. I pointed to make sure he wanted the particular drink and asked him “This?” and he nodded. When I realized the machine was only taking cards, I did a motion of swiping a card and said to him, “Do you have a card?”. After he swiped his card, I helped him type in the letter and the number for the drink, and he was so happy when it came out the bottom.

The connection between culture and language is very significant in the workplace. We find ourselves relying on this communication to know when we work next, create new ideas, find an understanding, and make connections with each other. Culture is not always learned, but in some circumstances, it is important to show what a culture is like to further reflect on what you are used to in your own culture. It is important to have cultural acceptance when it comes to beliefs, values, and prejudices because we all have them, and it is important to embrace differences between us.