WORK OBSERVATION REPORT
HELINE JAF
1IBM01A
Work observation 08/04/2015
Manager : Matthias Van Meenen – Mise en Place
Mise en Place – Matthias Van Meenen
Mise en Place is a company that was started up 21 years ago by Charlie Van Goch. 21 years
of experience, over 40 offices in 6 countries, 7 specialised labels and over 5000 trained
hospitality employees later, Mise en Place has become a well known brand.
They have 6 offices in Belgium today (in Ghent, Brussels, Antwerp, Kortrijk, Hasselt and
Leuven) and I am employed in Ghent as one of their 400 students here. Mise en Place works
solely with students (except for the managers and office personnel).
For my work observation I decided to follow Matthias Van Meenen's activities for a day, he is
the operations manager for Ghent. Mr. Van Meenen started working for Mise en Place on the
1st of Febuary 2011, while he was an occupational therapy student. Through working he
soon realised that a future with Mise en Place would satisfy him a lot more than continuing to
spend time behind his books. So he ended his studies and started working for Mise en Place
full-time as a Project Manager, until he got promoted to his current position of Operations
Manager on the 1st of Febuary 2014.
Mr. Van Meenen arrived to the office around 09:30 in the morning, which is later then he
usually arrives but he had done some work from home. He had already contacted soms
potential new clients. Once he arrived to the office most of the other office personnel had
already left for a national meeting in the Ghelamco Arena. This meant he was in charge of
the intern who was still at the office, he explained her tasks for the morning and made sure
she knew what she had to do. He then helped solve some problems at the meeting in the
Ghelamco through the phone.
He then made his to-do list for the day, which consisted of :
⁃ A proposal for the city of Ghent through mail.
⁃ Work on the Mise en Place Silver circle event (all working students who have worked 1000
hours or more for MeP) : Find out who needs to receive invites for the event on the
third of May, order that amount of engraved silver corkscrews, invite old Silver Circle
members for soms networking,...)
⁃ Call some new potential clients to set up face-to-face meetings.
⁃ Find out if a client who mailed about paying too much, has the right to a return of funds.
⁃ Find out how much staff Mep needs to provide for an event they're sponsoring.
⁃ Delegate the task of making a form for students to order their uniform from the stock that
has built up at the office.
⁃ National Meeting BDM (Belgium Decision Makers) : Mr. Van Meenen has to lead the
meeting so he needs to find a location, find out the items for the agenda,...
⁃ Call the debtors and make sure all overdue accounts get paid within a reasonable time
period.
Mr. Van Meenen started working at Mise en Place whilst he was still studying occupational
therapy in Ghent 4 years ago. He quickly realised that working offered him a lot more
satisfaction then studying did. So he stopped his studies started working for MeP full-time.
This lead him to become jobcoach, then Project Leader, Project Manager and since
01/02/2014 he has been the Operational Manager for Ghent. His future ambitions are to
keep growing within Mise en Place. He sees himself working more on the commercial aspect
of what Mise en Place is and does. However, Mr. Van Meenen hopes to eventually become a
self-employed entrepreneur but not within the same sector/branch as Mise en Place.
As Mr. Van Meenen didn’t obtain his degree due to ending his studies early, his school
experience didn’t really prepare him for his job. The sociological subjects he had at school
might have helped him with the social aspect of his job, as he does deal with a lot of different
people every day. He would however have liked to take more financial subjects to prepare
him for his current job.
Mr. Van Meenen says people skills are a really important quality to have in his line of work.
You need to be able to level with all sorts of different people, from the students who work for
you, to the bosses of large companies who want to hire your students for their events. He
says he loves his job because there’s a lot of social interactions with all sorts of people and
he enjoys making MeP’s clients happy. He also said that being the Operational Manager, he
can delegate any tasks he doesn’t enjoy quite as much to his staff.
I definitely learned a lot from my one day with Mr. Van Meenen. He showed me that
everyone can make it and achieve their goals, even if they might not get there in the most
conventional way, without a degree for example. The qualities and talents a person has are a
lot more important than anything you can learn from studying. That being said I do believe a
degree is very useful and important to have, but it isn’t the only way to achieve your dreams,
hard work and people skills are equally as important.
I think social skills are also one of my strengths, just like Mr. Van Meenen I enjoy interacting
with people from different backgrounds. IBM is a great way for me to practice my social skills
as well as working for Mise en Place. On the other hand I think I need more work on financial
matters because this is a much more important part of being a manager then I first thought.
Luckily, we have a lot of subjects that do relate to this, such as business economics,
accounting, banking & finance,….
I think IBM is a great programme to prepare me for a job like the one Mr. Van Meenen has. It
helps us develop our social and international interacting skills as well teaching us a lot of
useful information with regards to running a company, understanding how it works and doing
so on an international level.