What Is a Team Member and How to Become One

A team member is an employee who works in a group or team, like those who work in restaurants, retail, and hospitality. Team members may work in guest services, with food, or with customers. In this position, you may greet customers, clean up after them, or perform other duties related to customer service. Your responsibilities revolve around providing a satisfactory customer experience while working as a team to keep customers coming back time and again. Team members can be in front of the customer in guest services or as servers at a restaurant, or they can work behind the scenes, like housekeepers and kitchen staff.

Successful team members have many skills that set them apart from the crowd, but the most important is communication. Interpersonal skills are necessary on many levels for a team member to accurately and effectively complete their job duties. If you work directly with guests, you must have interpersonal skills to handle conflicts and complaints, put customers at ease, and create a rapport. If you work behind the scenes, you still need interpersonal skills to communicate with your fellow team members, management, and other staff. In addition to communication skills, team members should be flexible, able to solve problems, and self-starters.

The qualifications necessary to become a restaurant team member can almost all be learned on-the-job. Restaurants are great places to start if you have never had a job before, or if you are looking to move forward in the foodservice industry. Restaurant team members range from hosts and hostesses greeting guests, to servers taking orders and delivering meals, to kitchen staff and cooks preparing food to the specifications of the customers. All of these jobs require an ability to adapt to new environments, a willingness to learn, and communication skills. If you have those three things, you have the potential to be very successful as a restaurant team member.

The qualifications needed to be a retail team member are not incredibly high. You must merely enjoy working with people and working as part of a team. Retail is another industry where many people find their first job, so you aren't even required to have a high school diploma in most cases. Some retailers require you to be 18 years old to complete some job duties, especially if the job involves handling alcohol. Retail team members must have excellent communication skills to do their jobs, especially if they are working directly with customers.

The hospitality industry is very people-centric. Guests are important because there would be no industry without them, so ensuring their satisfaction and safety are of the utmost importance. The qualifications needed to get into the hospitality field as a team member are minimal, but you may be required to have a high school diploma. An associate's degree in hospitality, business, or administration is also helpful to begin a career in this industry. Guest services team members have to be top-notch communicators who can solve problems quickly and accurately to turn a guest's less-than-fantastic experience into a great one.