Jeff Weinstein shares tips for hiring and retaining deskless workers

Daniel Blaser (00:05):

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 it's my pleasure to speak with Jeff Weinstein. Jeff's impressive background includes running the company that was the largest Jamba franchisee, and he's agreed to share what he learned from that experience with you. He discusses the most overlooked component of hiring hourly employees, what those in the hospitality industry can do to not just survive but thrive, and a program he rolled out to his Jamba stores that made a huge difference in employee retention. Enjoy.

(00:42):

Jeff, it's so great to be speaking with you. I really appreciate your time.

Jeff Weinstein (00:46):

Hey, thank you very much for having me.

Daniel Blaser (00:47):

Yeah, absolutely. First question I just wanted to ask you about, you ran the company that was the largest Jamba franchisee, which is pretty cool. What were some of your top takeaways from that experience?

Jeff Weinstein (01:00):

When you're running an organization of that size? I think you've always got to stay rooted in why you're doing what you're doing. You always want to make sure that every decision you make as an organization ties back to what your real purpose is there. And for me, that was always about people. It was always first and foremost about creating really good opportunities for people. One of the tricks to growing like that, you've got to treat your hundredth store the same way that you treated your first store. And the way that you do that is that you've got a field organization of district managers, and you want to make sure that every time one of those district managers is visiting a store or having that conversation at the beginning of the day with the team or meeting with the team, that they're going to be doing the same things with that team that you would be doing. Because what you want is to really scale. You want to make sure that everything about the way, again, that a hundred store is working is the same way that you did it with the first one.

Daniel Blaser (02:10):

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think when I'm thinking of maybe the franchises that I have a more positive affiliation with, personally, it is a lot of times it comes down to that consistency from the customer experience, which is probably what comes out of what you're saying, right? That consistency as far as treating the store number 100, like store number 10 or whatever. So that definitely resonates with me. A lot of franchisees, specifically in the quick service restaurant space, I feel like have this dream of building this empire with dozens of locations. Maybe some of them are listening to this right now. What advice would you give somebody that has that as a goal or a dream?

Jeff Weinstein (02:53):

I think the first thing you got to do is you got to look in the mirror and you got to ask yourself why you want to do it. I would say that you have to make sure that you're doing it for the right reasons. Am I doing it just because I want to grow? Am I doing it for strictly financial reasons? There are easier ways to make a buck than in the restaurant business, but what is absolutely true about the restaurant business is that it is a business that's rooted in people. You've got to take great care of your people so that they will take great care of your guests, but it's not just about taking great care of those people, it's about investing in them and in their development. The vast majority of people in our business are coming to it with very little experience. For many of them, if it's not their first job, it's pretty close to being their first job. And so they're coming to you in some ways almost as a blank slate. And so it's your responsibility to invest in them, to develop them. And then if you do that, then you know that you're going to have a group of great people who are taking great care of your guests. And at the end of the day, this business, the lifeblood of the business is service and the guests and those guests wanting to come back again tomorrow.

Daniel Blaser (04:13):

When you talk about the importance of investing in people, in your experience, did you ever try anything, whether it was an initiative or a program or something that surprised you, either that in how well it worked or how much it didn't work like surprised you either way?

Jeff Weinstein (04:31):

One of the things that we did at Vital that I think had a really positive impact on our people is that we created a program where we gave our employees, especially our managers, the opportunity to direct the funds that we gave to our community, and we set up this program in a way to support and build community partnerships. But in effect, though, I think it also turned out to be something that helped us retain our best people because they felt that they had a personal stake and that they were empowered to direct where those funds were going and to make a difference in areas where they wanted to make a difference. So they had a say in choosing which organizations we were going to give to. We also were able to add a component to that program that we called a benevolence program, and I'll just give you an example. So every month our managers had the ability to direct funds to an organization, and we gave them the ability to direct those funds if they so chose to one of their team members who had a particular need at that time so that they can make an impact not only within the community, but for our own team members who had special needs. And I think that it was a program where it was intended to be a program for community partnership, but it turned out to also be a program that really helped really empower our employees.

Daniel Blaser (06:15):

It makes sense because good managers, they want to make a difference in the lives of the people that they manage to give them a little bit extra resources to make a difference beyond just being a good manager. I think that's really cool, really, really empowering,

Jeff Weinstein (06:32):

Daniel. The way that I think about this is that we want to make a difference in the day for our guests, but we want to make a difference in the lives of our employees and really engage them. You have to be able to connect everything that we do back to a purpose, and it's got to be a purpose that our employees can believe in. And so I think that that, let's go back to the question that you asked before about advice that you would give to somebody who wants to get started in this business, is you have to understand why am I in this? Because everything you do, you're going to want to connect back to what that original purpose was.

Daniel Blaser (07:12):

It's obviously kind of been a challenging time for the QSR space for hospitality. More broadly, there's hiring challenges, supply chain challenges. Now there's inflationary challenges with a lot of companies that are just kind of in survival mode. What would you recommend that they do, not just to survive but actually thrive at this point?

Jeff Weinstein (07:38):

Sure. Prime cost in this business is extremely challenging right now. Prime cost being your labor cost and your cost of goods sold. Look, there's parts of that that you can't control, right? You can't control supply chain disruption. You can't control commodity cost increases. You can't control minimum wage, right? So what can you control? I think the most important thing is that you identify any tasks or anything in your business that does not add value for your business and try to remove those costs or eliminate those tasks. And one of the best ways to do that is through technology. So when you're talking, for instance, about the process of hiring someone, if you can eliminate a lot of the unnecessary back and forth of phone calls, and let's be honest, I mean kids don't talk on the phone any longer. Everything is done by text. So to the extent that you can eliminate the back and forth of calling, leaving a message, waiting for them to call back, trying to schedule to remove all that and almost make the process itself invisible using technology. And it's not to eliminate engagement with your applicants or with your employees, really, it's about eliminating all the noise so that you can focus on the engagement and you can have a real conversation with people and really spend your very valuable time there instead of in the back and forth. So I think that finding technology solutions is really one of the keys to eliminating unnecessary cost in the business because that's the part that we can control,

Daniel Blaser (09:28):

Obviously, kind of music to my ears and work streams years to hear you say that because what we're hoping to do is eliminate the non rewarding parts of those interactions, like you said, but still leave the meaningful conversations and interviews in place. And looking forward a little bit, let's say five to 10 years in the future, maybe I'd just love to hear some of your predictions. There's obviously always trends in the hospitality industry. What sort of trends do you anticipate are you kind of interested to see come out over the next five to 10 years?

Jeff Weinstein (10:03):

I think there are certain things that are always going to be true. In order to be successful, you have to start with a great product. You are going to though always need to be innovating that product. You're going to need to be able to anticipate the needs of your guests. And so it's not enough just to have that product. You've always got to be innovating, coming up with new ideas and new ways to deliver it and to deliver it better, deliver it faster, and to satisfy your guests. I think that the biggest and most obvious thing is technology is going to be critically important. We talked a little bit about the importance of technology in the process, just as an example of hiring, but technology is, and I think we have to be careful. I think sometimes people worry about when we talk about technology that it's going to be replacing the human part of the business.

(11:00):

And I think very differently about that. I think that the trick is using technology to eliminate the stuff that's not so important so that we can spend more time engaging with our employees and also with our guests to the extent that we can automate certain parts of the process, whether it's the cooking process or the administrative tasks or whatever happens to happen within the four walls of the store, to automate that as much as possible so that we can spend the vast majority of our time not only delivering a great experience for our guests, but also coaching and having meaningful conversations with our employees. So I think that that's, the technology's going to happen. I think that the key to success is going to be using technology in the right way to elevate the guest experience and to elevate the experience of working in the industry

Daniel Blaser (11:57):

With all of the hiring challenges. Specifically over the last now 12, 18, 24 months, what have you personally learned about hiring the desk list workforce?

Jeff Weinstein (12:08):

You have to give them a sense of purpose. You have to do better than just provide them with a job. You've got to be able to provide them with a sense of purpose in their work, and it needs to be, look, sometimes people come to us and they're going to school and they're looking for a job to do while they're going to school, and then they're going to move on to something that's more specialized, and that's great if that works for them, that can work for us. It's a great relationship, but a lot of people are coming to us without a longer term plan, and they may not be in school and they're looking for meaning and they're looking for a future. So to really retain those great team members, you have to, I think about it as every point of engagement that I have with them always involves some kind of coaching.

(13:09):

I'm not only telling them what they need to do, I'm also always telling them why they need to do it. And I'm trying to provide more perspective about why we need to do it so that they can start to think not just about the task in front of them, but about the restaurant and about their coworkers and about the guests and about growth and about how the business works. The more that you could always be coaching them or finding some additional value to add in your interactions with them, I think is the key to retaining them. And there's always a lot of turnover or churn in our business, but there doesn't have to be as much as there is. And I think that the key to reducing that churn is really about the way you engage with each one of those team members.

Daniel Blaser (13:54):

The last 12 months maybe we've experienced a lackluster amount of customer service more than we are used to, and a lot of that is down to these staffing challenges and other issues. But I feel like when I've had good interactions, especially lately, those are more meaningful to me, maybe because there's more contrast. And I have to imagine that a lot of those meaningful interactions that I've had, probably somewhere there was a manager that was giving a little bit more meaning to that employee, whether it's through those coaching opportunities or programs, kind of like we've talked about, right?

Jeff Weinstein (14:33):

It really does start with that manager. And I think in the best organizations within our industry, we get to as close to a hundred percent of management having been developed from within the organization. And that is actually something that's to do. It's possible to build an organization if you really do it the right way, where it's a very rare exception that you're hiring a manager from outside the organization. Instead, what you want are team members who you've developed into shift leads and then who have grown into assistant general managers and then general managers, manager, the general manager position being the single most important position in most organizations. So again, that's where the coaching and development, the importance of coaching and development comes in. And it's also the key to when you look, it's never been harder to deliver a great service experience than it has been these past couple of years for I think, reasons that we all understand. But if you come in tomorrow and we recognize you, we know you by name, we understand your order, we understand how you like your order customized look, that is the key to guests wanting to come back. And it's a key to us getting back to the kind of service experience that we know we want to be able to deliver on ideal circumstances. And I feel very confident that these past several months especially, we're starting to get back to being able to deliver the same kind of experience that we did prior to the pandemic.

Daniel Blaser (16:09):

When you talk about this goal of having all of your management come from within, what sort of attributes or what sort of things are you looking for with newer employees that kind of to you signal, okay, this person probably has the qualities that we need to be able to mold and shape into a manager?

Jeff Weinstein (16:34):

Yeah. I'm really looking for two things, Daniel. The first one is a spark, right? And it doesn't have to be a spark specifically about our business or about restaurants. It's just a spark about something, right? There's something that when they talk about it, you can see them light up a little bit, right? It can be a subject in school or could be music, or it could be some other activity that they're engaged in outside of school, or it could be something that they're just engaged in right now on TikTok, it doesn't really matter. It's that they're passionate about something because if they have that passion in them, we can find that within the four walls of our restaurant. So it starts there. And then I think an interest and desire to learn is really important, right? You're coming into this business often without an extensive educational background. Maybe you've never worked in a restaurant before. The vast majority of you're going to learn is what you on the job. So I need to find people. I need to see in people that there's an interest and a desire to learn, and the ones who are learners are the ones who are going to be the most successful.

Daniel Blaser (17:59):

Jeff, I just wanted to give you the chance, if you want, acknowledging the fact that a lot of people listening to this, they're HR directors, they're in ops, they're all centered around hiring and retaining employees. Do you have any final thoughts or takeaways or recommendations that you'd like to sign off with?

Jeff Weinstein (18:18):

What I've always loved about this business is that you don't have to have experience to be successful in it. And so it creates a great opportunity for us to develop people regardless of what their background is. And so I think about this business as a meritocracy in the best sense of the word, that if you are engaged, if you have an interest and desire to learn, then you can be successful in this business. And we have a great responsibility. I feel a great responsibility to think about all these new team members that way and make our industry really for everyone. So what I would say to HR functional leaders, like HR managers or multiunit operators, or anybody who wants to be in the restaurant business, is that ask yourself, am I really invested in people? And if I'm, you have a great opportunity not just to be successful in your business, but to do the world. Some good.

Daniel Blaser (19:35):

Thank you for listening to On the Clock. For show notes and more info, visit workstream us slash podcast. I've included that link as well as some other links to connect with Jeff and learn what he's up to in the show notes. Until next time, we're clocking out.