Crumbl franchisee Christian Bankhead shares how to beat the 90 day retention curse

Daniel Blaser (00:00):

<Silence> Hello and welcome to On the Clock, presented by Workstream. If you care about hiring and retaining hourly employees, you're in the right place. I'm Daniel Blaser, and today I'm clocking in with Christian Bankhead. Christian is a crumble franchise partner with three stores, and he's doing some super innovative stuff with his hiring and onboarding. We discuss how to extend the screening process past day one and how to embrace onboarding to encourage long-term retention. We also discuss the importance of training benchmarks and how to implement them without weighing down managers. Enjoy. Can you kind of set the stage with like, you know, what sort of retention challenges were you facing before implementing some of the ideas and strategies that we're gonna talk about today?

Christian Bankhead (00:51):

Hmm. Sure. I kinda laugh, you know, using the best business strategy possible, we decided that May of 2021 was the best time to open a cookie store, mid covid, you know, everyone kind of feeling the burn of, of whatever turmoil it was. And we surprised ourselves on how busy we were. I think the store opened with maybe, you know, 30 employees and it really needed to be staffed with probably a hundred. We weren't using any sort of software at the time. We were kind of using a combination of our payroll provider and, you know, try to use different methods. One, anyone in their right mind who wasn't insane would walk in and see the absolute chaos that was ensuing and be like, I don't wanna work here. The second thing was we were not agile. The only time we could review employees of who had applied was normally at 1:00 AM after we were done working all day.

(01:42):

And so reaching out via text message or email at 1:00 AM was not working out well. We rarely got a response back, and sometimes it was a day or two beyond when they had first reached out to us. So then we found a competitive software kind of started using them. They toted some really cool technology advantages, and to give them credit, they helped us organize quite well. However, it was still very manually invested. In fact, at one point I thought about just hiring a person full-time to manage that software. Right? And and so while it helped us kind of understand the organization of it, we still struggled to staff to par like to, to model where we wanted to be. You know, it's funny, since moving to workstream, we quickly realized some numbers before we moved to workstream. One in four candidates who were hired would actually make it to their first paycheck meaning that they were still employed by the time we issued that paycheck.

(02:37):

That's a two to three week window, depending on when they start. And so, you know, it's ironic to think I need to staff the store with 80 people. I've got hire 320 people essentially in order to correctly staff it, we call that an FTLA failure to launch <laugh>. And I can say that one of the best parts about using workstream is we've completely reversed that statistic. I haven't looked lately. I doubt it's higher than 25%. I bet it's a lot lower. But luckily now when we hire someone, they get started on a pathway that they're able to follow and understand the steps, and it helps us significantly you know, fulfill those positions.

Daniel Blaser (03:14):

That's awesome. Definitely got glad you're able to kind of reverse that trend. We kind of teed this all up that we're gonna share three tactics or kind of three ways to break through this retention curse. The first one is all about using onboarding to your advantage. I think most people it's like onboarding. Yeah. You know, fill out the documents, sign the thing, like, you know, it is what it is. But I'd love to hear your kind of philosophy around onboarding Christian and you know, almost why I, in chatting with you before, you can almost use it as a final screening step. Just kind of walk us through how you think of onboarding and, and why it's maybe a little bit different than how a lot of other people approach it.

Christian Bankhead (03:55):

Sure. you know, it's interesting you say that just because you've been told you're hired doesn't mean your interview stopped. Right? The onboarding is very much part of the interview process still. When you're hired, we put you through a very simple cascade of tasks that need to happen in order to be ready to work your first day. I employ in Ohio that includes for minors, maybe a work permit. It includes for all employees signing some company documents and, and you know, providing payroll information, some very clean basics. We've noticed that if we invest the time to make this simple, easy, clear, follow the instructions from point A to point B people who struggle with that, not in a maybe technology challenge side, but rather they choose to take shortcuts, which don't fulfill the requirement that indicates that to us, they're probably not gonna be good at reading a recipe.

(04:52):

Right. let's talk about crumbles secret sauce here. We're serving gourmet cookies. These are the best cookies you've ever had. There's no shortcuts. You, you have to do it. We make 'em every day in store. We gotta do it the hard way. And so we've noticed that people who the more we invest in our onboarding and the more people kind of follow through that indicates that they're gonna be a successful employee. If they are struggling through it, we often reach out, show some love, show some support, see what it is we can do. But it does give us a red flag. Ultimately, people who aren't able to complete onboarding, we go ahead and, and choose to not continue with employment at that point. So it is a great indicator for us. It's, you know, like I said, the interview doesn't stop at the, you're hired, it continues on to your first day. So

Daniel Blaser (05:36):

Yeah. That's really interesting. It's almost, you know, in thinking of how to break through this retention curse, you know, you can summarize what you're saying as like, really double check that you are investing in the right people. Right. You've, you've already done the screening process, the hiring process, but I love how you said that you know, onboarding is actually the kind of the final step of the, the hiring process in a way. Can you provide some specific examples of like, some of the complexities or some of the other, you know issues that you might run into that, that are those red flags?

Christian Bankhead (06:09):

Sure. everyone in America here has to complete an I nine, right? We all know document A, document B, document C, right? One of my favorite things is we have a very explicit you know, list of document A or B and C. We summarized it at the top and we even went and embedded a video that is from, I believe the is this the treasury or the IRS, whoever's, you know stipulating this. And it basically tells 'em explicitly what they need to have and bring. If you're not able to provide us those IDs after reading through that and check marking, yes, I understand and will bring my two forms of ID on my first day, that is a very clear indicator that you are not going to read through the instructions correctly. Nobody likes paperwork. Nobody enjoys long lists of documents and digging through the closet and trying to find it.

(07:01):

However you know, if it's a, oops, I forgot it, maybe I can understand. But if it's a, I came totally unprepared and had no idea I needed it, that indicates to me you'd rather check a box and move to the next step than read through and understand what's required. You know, kind of talking about another complexity that's been really interesting is we used to have our document signing step in one big step. So we took a PDF viewer compiled our NDA, our dress code policy, our covid policy, all in one big thing that they could click through and sign everything on. And while that's great, we actually realized that breaking it down into each an individual step helped us track their kind of progress as they go along. You know, workstream does a great job communicating what they've done and what they still need to do.

(07:45):

Seeing 10 steps, you know, it's, it's a long list, but it's really, each individual part is much smaller, but it lets me see, are they chucking through this or are they hung up on a certain part? Where are they at? How long is it taking them? I told you kind of before this call, we started looking at days and stage, you know, how long have they been in this onboarding stage? And we've kind of set a two week mark for us as an indicator that if they're not, you know, ready and complete by week two, they're most likely not gonna ever complete it. And so that's kind of our cutoff.

Daniel Blaser (08:15):

Yeah, that's really interesting. You know, because obviously like the, the work stream onboarding process is, is designed to be as quick and as efficient as possible. But it's, yeah, it's interesting to hear your perspective of like, well, sure, it can all just be one step in one giant PDF, but you're not getting the right I guess the right data back from that. Right? So you know, it's each individual step can be quick and efficient and easy to complete, but by breaking it up yeah, you, you get a better kind of a, a better bird's eye view of how the process is going. That's really interesting.

Christian Bankhead (08:53):

Kind of jump into the, the, the summary here of why we do this too. I think we often forget how expensive it is to train an employee, right? And so we're looking for opportunities to a figure out if the training's not gonna be received and then able to sort of continue with the process. We're also looking b to take advantage of training opportunities while we're onboarding. So guess what? Our dress code policy is exactly how you need to show up to your first day shift. And instead of having them come in jeans in a t-shirt and them being trained on how to dress and not being able to work out front their first day, we now have a process where they show up ready to go, we put the hat, we put the uniform on, we give them a big smile, and we say, get ready. It's gonna be a blast. And so it's, it's such a simpler process where we're able to include the training as part of the onboarding to a, save us time and money, but b, help indicate whether they're going to be a good fit for the company.

Daniel Blaser (09:47):

Yeah, yeah. And you're, you know, you've kind of led into how we kind of designated the, the second tactic which is including training. You know, not, not thinking in terms of, okay, onboarding, okay, check next stage training, but kind of melding them together. I'd love to hear are there any other ways that you've been able to do that or that you've considered kind of combining those or get, you know, jump jumping into the training within the onboarding process?

Christian Bankhead (10:15):

Absolutely. I'll talk about my favorite one. So historically, someone completes onboarding. We get a little text message that says, Hey, this person's done, ready to check on 'em. However, if you're, if you're, you know, two hands deep in chocolate chip dough, you're not checking your text messages. So occasionally we would miss somebody who'd finished and we would fail to reach out to 'em within three or four days when those are three or four days we could have been utilizing to help them get on board. What we've done instead is our last step of our onboarding is for them to be added to our Slack channel. We use Slack as a way to communicate the last step. There's a QR code and a link into our Slack workspace. The way Slack works, I get a little notification when they join. So like, I have control of who's coming in.

(10:58):

But what it does is it allows them to join, it gives them a summary of how we use Slack. It talks to them about the different channels and how each one is used, but then it prompts them to go in and send a direct message to their general manager, to myself, who I'll kind of call like a hiring manager. And it also prompts them to message the assistant general manager who helps with scheduling, and it tells them, Hey, my name is Christian Bankhead. This is my cell phone, this is my email. I can start, you know, September 20th, right? And they type that message. Now, there's two benefits to this. Instantly I have that message in my work queue, so I'm not digging through my personal cell phone trying to find where that work. You know, e you know, text message was go back to work stream and figure out who was ready.

(11:41):

So instantly I get 'em scheduled in and I'm ready to go. The second benefit is, guess what? If they have any problems, questions, concerns, they've got the top three or four people who can answer their questions already in a dm. And that allows them to ask the question of, Hey, are these shoes okay? Right. These are the ones I used in my previous job. Is this sufficient for the job? Hey you know, is, do we need to park somewhere special or do we need to do this, that, or the other? And they're even more prepared for the first day. We love using the onboarding process to help facilitate to where the person arrives. They feel like a crumble employee and not like a new onboard. So we give them as much as we possibly can to, to familiarize them with what's gonna happen and even project out what the next week, two weeks, you know, three weeks looks like, so that they feel prepared.

(12:26):

I think one of the best indicators, and you know, I I I run a franchise, we make cookies. We're not hiring salary positions for every position in our bakery, right? A lot of this is hourly work. That's pretty standard in the food industry. One of the best indicators of what a good employee is gonna be for me is someone who's a self-starter, right? And I give any self-starter. I give them every step they can in order to be as prepared as possible for their work. Again, those who aren't self-starters generally struggle to get to that point. And so that helps us as an indicator whether they're gonna succeed. But beyond that, we've noticed that if you're, if you're agile, if you're letting the self-starters be quick, you are gonna beat out your competitor who might also be fast. 'cause Let's be honest, people aren't interviewing at 20 places and picking the job. That's the absolute best they're interviewing until they find one good enough, and then they want to get started. And if you lag, you're gonna lose their attention. And so I think it's a service to both us and a service to those that are ready to work. It lets them get in, get their first paycheck. Let's get it rolling.

Daniel Blaser (13:33):

Have you had a situation, Christian, where, because you've given these opportunities to the self-starters, because you've maybe added a couple of steps to, you know, complete through the onboarding process, just, just to kind of see what's gonna happen has that ever provided you with an opportunity to like identify someone who might be a good leader, like, you know, maybe earlier than you would've otherwise? If that makes sense?

Christian Bankhead (13:59):

It does make sense, and absolutely. And I would say that it's actually probably our number one indicator <laugh> of how successful they're gonna be as a leader. One of the beauties of those who aren't familiar with crumbles, we change flavors every Monday. So every Monday there's a new lineup, there's new ingredients, there's new techniques. In order to produce that cookie, I need someone who can handle multitasking and handle it with ease. We often joke that we're looking for the people who are just traumatized enough to handle the chaos, right? We want them to succeed, but they gotta not be afraid of change. And honestly, getting through an an onboarding should be, you know a super easy, you know, piece of cake or a piece of cookie if we're keeping it on brand here. So yeah, absolutely. I think it, I think it's a huge indicator.

(14:42):

There's a lot of other non-leadership sort of positions in our bakery, right? We're looking for people who maybe they don't manage people well, but they manage recipes really well, or they manage workflows really well, right? Everything at crumble is baked fresh. So when I sell a cookie out the front door, that cookie cannot be over 90 minutes old. So I've gotta both anticipate, you know, how, how many guests are gonna come in. I need to be able to read the crowd and know if I'm over or under baking. I need people who have intuition. And you don't always get lucky enough to find people who are good people managers and good technically, you know, inclined people. And so I think getting through onboarding doesn't necessarily mean that they're a great people person, but it definitely means that they're an employee who potentially could have a skillset that maybe doesn't mean leadership of people, but leadership of production.

Daniel Blaser (15:29):

Let's move on to tactic number three. I'd love to hear your training benchmarks, and that is kind of the, the third way to break through this this retention challenge. I think specifically we talked earlier about like seven day, 30 day, or you've kind of like figured out these, you know, these different milestones. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Christian Bankhead (15:53):

Sure. So one of the biggest incentives of the job is you're working around cookies all day, right? We have an employee discount, but beyond that, when employees are new, cookies are still exciting, right? Why would we wanna withhold a very easy currency to, you know, give them, we have what we call the PIN program. Every employee wears a hat like this. They get a little name tag that says their name, and on the other side, they're allowed to put pins of different skills and objectives they've had. These can easily be presented to them. They're allowed to sort of self embark on some of these trainings. And I'll go through a few of 'em just to give example, but cookie quality, if they know how to source the information about the cookie, how to ensure the quality's correct there's an ovens pin to know how to do that exact timing thing that I just described.

(16:42):

You know, there's, there's a number of pins that basically are available for them to work through. Let's talk about what my expectations are at day 7 30, 67. The main thing is getting on the schedule and letting us know your availability, getting on a consistent schedule and routine, showing up for your shift, clocking in, clocking out. You, you know, you know where to park, you know how to keep your uniform clean. I'm looking at those very basic indicators right there, right? Fantastic. You made it day seven, here's your free cookie. You did a great job. Right? Let's talk about some of the bigger achievements. 30 days is the minimum amount of time to earn a pin, and realistically, no one's gonna start on day one earning pins. If they did, that'd be impressive. But day 60 you know, by 30 I wanna know that they're gaining the skills, right?

(17:23):

That they can do multiple positions within the bakery. And by 60, I would like to see at least a pin level mastery of it. With that comes different incentives. We have one location that's currently doing a program that we really love where you basically get a four pack if you can earn your pins within that 60 day period. And then there's like a 90 day follow up with them. So 90 days is normally the first day where unless we've been prompted to give some direct feedback in order to help them maintain their employment 90 days, we go ahead and give them feedback no matter what. So let's say the perfect employee, they're walking on water, just killing it, you know, we're gonna look for something that maybe isn't their strength, help push 'em, nudge 'em towards that to help continue and inspire that growth.

(18:05):

Kind of when we monitor that, I feel like it gives them a sense of comfort because the, we gotta remember from the employee side, the biggest fear is the unknown. When you don't know where you are that leaves you a lot of insecurity and potentially people could leave just simply 'cause of that anxiety. When you know where you are, there's comfort in knowing that there's a path forward that you're comfortable where you're at or you're, you know, you're working towards a common goal with your, your manager. So yeah, those are kind of our little bit of steps. You know, I was really excited to kind of hear that workstream always is innovating, but that there's some things there that are actually gonna help us manage beyond the onboarding. And that kind of spoke to me because right now to manage that 7 30, 60, 90 day benchmarks I'm kind of getting creative, right? I'm, I'm letting them print out something as the last part of their onboarding. They take it with them, they manage it, but, you know, how much better would it be if I could communicate in bulk to all employees between 25 and 35 days, you know, onboarded. And it's very simple and easy to do. So

Daniel Blaser (19:08):

I would love to hear Christian about, you know, when you talk about these different milestones and these incentives how are, how is this program having a little bit of this structure, how is that helping you and your managers and like freeing up their time <laugh>?

Christian Bankhead (19:25):

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so let's look at the alternative, right? The alternative is the sink or swim method, and there's no lifeguard on duty, right? You're either gonna make it or you're not gonna work and we're just gonna let you go, right? And how many times as employers, is that the condition we throw our new hires into, right? But if we at least allow them to walk into the shallow end and then move towards the deep end, they have a better success rate altogether. We, we don't recognize often the opportunity cost of training and hiring. Even if, you know, even if it's subtle, even if you're only hiring one or two people a month that opportunity cost is significant. How many, how many less than three star reviews can we attribute to an employee who is undertrained or, or fairly new, right?

(20:14):

And so there is a massive opportunity cost in both money and time spent when we work to kind of create a process they can go through. Beyond that, there is also so much brainstorming and work and effort that can go into developing a training plan. I don't know how many managers have given me the feedback. We need better training. So I'm gonna sit for one whole week in a library and write you a 15 page manual on everything a new hire needs to know. And what happens, we never use it, it never gets implemented correctly. We can't afford to pay a new employee for one week to not produce. And so it ends up being too difficult to implement. What I like about workstream is it's self-driven. It's integrated as part of the onboarding. And then once we kind of give them that little shove and good luck, like I said, we're starting them in the shallow end. They have the tools they need, it's now up to them to kind of start implementing it with their, their managers.

Daniel Blaser (21:05):

Yeah. That's cool. What sort of employee response have you gotten, whether it's, you know, specific feedback or just things you, you've observed, you know, what's the been the employee response around the benchmarks? You mentioned the pins, some of the other training stuff we talked about more broadly. Sure.

Christian Bankhead (21:25):

You know, I'll kind of hit it from two perspectives here. One, I thought employees would recognize that we used a software for hiring. I was actually thoroughly surprised that they believed it was me the entire time. I like that I take the time when I do a, any automation as part of my stages of hiring, I reword it. So it's not like, congratulations Miss Jenner. You know, you have been selected to have an interview. I say, Hey, you know, Sarah, we're super excited to see you. Here are some times we're available. Do you wanna pick one that works for you and we'll meet you at crumble? You know, so I make it really personal so that way it feels organic. And it's funny, the amount of people that feel like this process was me just texting them the entire time, and yet I've never even seen them.

(22:12):

You know, because everything's automated up until the point they arrive for the interview. That, that from the employee perspective is huge 'cause, right? How many spam calls do we get? How much robo, you know, junk do we get? It just gets filtered into that bucket, right? From the other perspective, from the employee. I think it does, like what I said, gives them the comfort to know where they're at, where they're going, you know, and how to get there, right? One time we had a, we, we have a policy at Crumble where each person when they walk in the door gets greeted with a welcome to crumble and all employees participate in it. We have a customer service pin. I remember watching a manager go up to an employee and said, Hey, I've asked you twice to today to say welcome to Crumble, and you're missing it.

(22:55):

You're, you're just kind of in your own head. You're missing the, the people coming in. I'm gonna have to take that pin. And I was like, oh my gosh. Like, blew me away. You know, go manager for, for being obedient, you know, getting on that. But what did I see after that? I saw a hundred percent welcome to Crumble and not only welcome to crumble, but a welcome to Crumble with a big smile and then a quick glance at the manager to see if they saw <laugh>. And so we're getting the results we want because of it. We're seeing that we have to basically staff fewer employees because they have the skills. You know, one of the struggles in the past was we have beautiful pink frosted cookies or a variety of cookies that have this beautiful crumble, sea swirl we call it on it.

(23:32):

Maybe only 10% of our staff had that skill and it was detrimental to us. 'cause Guess what? If you have a a week where that's a really high selling cookie, those people for eight hours a day every day are frosting cookies nonstop. And that is not fun for one employee. Now it's a requirement that all employees learn that in their first 90 days. And so now that I have a plethora of people available, they're allowed to rotate through, give variety of the job, and it definitely enriches the value of the job. And that's all just something we set as an expectation from the beginning, right? That's, that's no more invested effort than what we were doing before. We just had to type it once, invest the hour to create the onboarding and, and, you know, become explicit about what we expect. And after that, it does it on its own.

Daniel Blaser (24:21):

Thank you for listening to On the Clock. For more info, visit workstream.us/podcast. Until next time, we're clocking out.