Four Ways Technology Helps Franchise Operators Reduce Staff Turnover
From training to retention, here’s how technology is revolutionizing franchise workforce management.
Franchise operators are experiencing many economic challenges, with labor shortages and historically high turnover topping the list. Matt Goebel, the founder of Woven, outlines how franchise operators can reduce staff turnover by investing in the right technology to help bolster retention. Goebel provides four steps that help remove unnecessary friction to retain employees, including building an efficient tech stack, enhancing communication, improving onboarding, and providing ongoing training.
It’s an experience many of us are having — we go to our favorite local franchise and find short staffing impacting customer service and leaving us disappointed. No business can afford poor customer service in today’s competitive market.
Franchise operators deal with economic challenges, labor shortages, and historically high turnover. Turnover damages morale, productivity, and customer service while generating significant hiring and training costs. Franchises need help to afford to keep replacing and retraining employees. Operators must double down on providing a positive and rewarding employee experience to retain their workers. Investing in the right technology can help bolster retention.
Why Franchise Turnover Is So High
Hourly jobs are especially prone to high turnover. Before we can address this problem, we must understand why it happens.
The reality is hourly jobs are not glamorous. Due to their nature, franchise positions require significant work and are often thankless. Workers often need more support and support on the job, like excessive administrative tasks and undefined or inconsistent processes.
Even the most minor issues can cause a turnover. GenZ, a group filling a significant portion of hourly positions, has a low tolerance for inefficiency. They want competitive wages, meaningful work, work/life balance, a supportive work environment, and skill development. For these employees, reality rarely aligns with their expectations, and they are willing to jump ship for a different opportunity quickly.
Steps to Smarter Retention
Franchisees need properly trained and engaged employees to provide good customer service. These four steps can help remove unnecessary frustration to retain employees.
1. Build an efficient tech stack
All jobs require a wide variety of tools. This holds especially true in franchise environments where employees need access to policies, scheduling, training, and communication. In the case of some locations, their software may be separate from corporate’s, adding yet another required login.
Remembering a dozen passwords and toggling between countless applications is frustrating. Psychology and neuroscience show that context-switching (what happens when you jump between programs) is mentally taxing, slows users down, increases stress, and disrupts focus. The wasted time is especially frustrating when you need to help customers, restock shelves, clean, and do other customer-experience-enhancing tasks.
Consolidating your tech stack removes a significant source of employee friction. When choosing your solutions, search for tools that provide multiple functionalities or can link multiple platforms to a single dashboard. With this setup, employees are more likely to access important messages, policies, and training because they are all in one place when they log in. Managers also have most or all data at their fingertips, preventing some mistakes in areas like scheduling or ordering. Minimizing tech sprawl goes a long way to improving the experience.
2. Enhance communication
Communication is the basis of human relationships and is crucial in the workplace. A Dynamic Signal survey found nearly 70% of employees would be less likely to quit if their company had better communication.
Effective communication helps workers feel more connected and engaged, leading to better performance and less turnover. The interactions must come from leaders and peers, which can be difficult with varied shifts and geographically dispersed locations. Leaders can invest in technology to aid this effort.
Technology allows management to send messages to everyone and enables employees to engage with one another and communicate with managers. Asynchronous capabilities bridge gaps between locations and shifts to build connections.
As you build your communication platform, remember to include recognition. Countless studies show employees are more likely to stay on the job and work harder if their efforts receive praise.
See More: Why Communication Is Essential to Employee Engagement
3. Improve onboarding
Onboarding makes a difference. A CareerBuilder and Silkroad Technology survey found 9% of employees left a company because of poor onboarding experiences. That’s about one in 10 leaving before even getting started. If initial training does not prepare workers for the floor, they will likely feel overwhelmed and dissatisfied with their role, possibly leading them to quit. Additionally, a tedious process can cause frustration, a feeling you don’t want your employees to experience when just starting their job.
Technology streamlines onboarding. You can collect all resources in one place and seamlessly integrate learning materials with experience. The right software also makes learning interactive, with features like quizzes, exercises, and role-playing. These functionalities make training more interesting, and employees are more likely to retain information.
See More: Using Technology for an Effective Onboarding Process
4. Provide ongoing training
Employees, especially GenZers, are interested in building their skills. Gallup statistics show that 64% of survey respondents believe upskilling opportunities are an important reason to stay at their job. Ongoing training will also prepare workers for new challenges and changes on the job.
You can’t stop work to hold long training sessions. So how do you provide learning opportunities? You work them into everyday workflows and present them in bite-sized portions. Franchise workers don’t have an hour to watch a video, but they might have 10 minutes. And they are more likely to engage if it’s part of their regular activities.
Training materials can be overwhelming to manage, but technology can help. You can store everything in one place, making it easily accessible to employees. Technology can also help you keep content fresh by making it easy to create new modules, update existing material and remove outdated items. You can also segment content based on role or experience to provide employees with the most relevant information.
Employee retention is difficult to achieve but imperative for franchise performance. Technology enables you to reduce friction, eliminate frustration and provide value to improve employee experience. But tools alone are not enough. Hearing, understanding, and addressing your workers’ needs and challenges go a long way toward building engagement and job satisfaction.
How do you think technology can revolutionize franchise workforce management? Let us know on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
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