3 ways to break the 90-day retention curse

Daniel Blaser (00:00):

Hello everyone. My name is Daniel and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's webinar, which is all about beating that 90 day retention curse. There's a lot of data that shows if you're able to get your hourly employees past 90 days, they're much more likely to stick around for the long term, and so we've brought Christian Bank Bankhead, he's a crumble franchise partner, and he has some really interesting ways that he's approached breaking through this 90 day curse. I want to tease one thing. At the end of this webinar, we're actually going to share a way that everyone watching this can actually qualify for a $50 Amazon gift card, so I'm just going to tease that and we'll talk about what that will actually look like at the end of the webinar. But to kick things off, Christian, I'd love to hear just about your stores. Where are they, number of employees, that good stuff?

Christian Bankhead (00:52):

Sure, absolutely. So we have three crumble cookie stores in Cincinnati that we're currently working with. We have three more being built, so stay tuned. Cincinnati is a unique market. They love their cookies here, so we stay very busy and we have a lot of fun as far as employees go. Believe it or not, there is a season for cookies. We do fluctuate sometimes anywhere around a hundred to 200 employees depending on the high sales season. It's funny, I always get asked what's the low season for cookies? And I tell 'em it's January 1st when everyone's committed to losing weight, but don't worry, by Valentine's Day they're all coming back for dates. So we have that seasonality also with summer and with kids going out and using us for dates and things like that. But because of that little bit of fluctuation, we've had to do a decent amount of hiring, so we hire through quite a few employees each year. With the three more opening, we're getting ready to hire another couple hundred employees. So as far as using workstream and hiring, we stay very busy with that.

Daniel Blaser (01:50):

Awesome. Like I mentioned, this webinar is all about breaking through this 90 day wall or I've heard it called a 90 day challenge. Can you kind of set the stage with what sort of retention challenges were you facing before implementing some of the ideas and strategies that we're going to talk about today?

Christian Bankhead (02:12):

Sure. I kind of laugh using the best business strategy possible. We decided that May of 2021 was the best time to open a cookie store, mid covid, everyone kind of feeling the burn of whatever turmoil it was and we surprised ourselves on how busy we were. I think the store opened with maybe 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 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 want to 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 and so reaching out via text message or email at 1:00 AM was not working out well.

(03:07):

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 and so while it helped us kind of understand the organization of it, we still struggled to staff to par to model where we wanted to be. 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. That's a two to three week window depending on when they start.

(04:00):

And so it's ironic to think I need to staff this store with 80 people. I've got to hire 320 people essentially in order to correctly staff it. We call that an FTLA failure to launch, 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 fulfill those positions. So yeah,

Daniel Blaser (04:36):

That's awesome. Definitely glad you were able to kind of reverse that trend. John, I did want to ask, do you maybe off the top of your head, no, that failure to launch rate, is that something that you've heard from other customers that somewhere around what Christian was experiencing?

John Guldner (04:57):

Yes, and what's really nice is that you at least had hope Christian, that there is another option out there. A lot of the customers we talked to as they're signing up, they almost don't believe it and they have it kind of baked in those numbers. You said we have to hire 300 to get 80. That's just like if they've been operating pre-work stream for long enough, they just think that's a standard and so we love just seeing that light bulb moment a month in where they're like, it doesn't have to be this way. But yeah, super common, not just, I mean and crumbles a great brand, but some other brands that might not have the most or companies that might not have the highest operating standard. It's just something they're used to. So kind of shocking to hear it from our end, but we definitely hear that a lot.

Daniel Blaser (05:48):

Alright, so we teed this all up that we're going to share three tactics or 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, fill out the document, sign the thing, it is what it is, but I'd love to hear your philosophy around onboarding Christian and almost why 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 why it's maybe a little bit different than how a lot of other people approach it.

Christian Bankhead (06:26):

Sure. It's interesting you say that just because you've been told you're hired doesn't mean you're 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 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 going to be good at reading a recipe, right?

(07:24):

Let's talk about crumble secret sauce here. We're serving gourmet cookies. These are the best cookies you've ever had. There's no shortcuts. You have to do it. We make 'em every day in store. We got to 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 going to 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 choose to not continue with employment at that point, so it is a great indicator for us. Like I said, the interview doesn't stop at the, you're hired. It continues on to your first day.

Daniel Blaser (08:07):

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

Christian Bankhead (08:40):

Sure. Everyone in America here has to complete an I nine. We all know document A, document B, document C. One of my favorite things is we have a very explicit list of document A or 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 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. However, if it's an, 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.

(09:47):

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. Workstream does a great job communicating what they've done and what they still need to do, seeing 10 steps, 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 before this call, we started looking at days and stage, 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 ready and complete by week two, they're most likely not going to ever complete it, and so that's kind of our cutoff.

Daniel Blaser (10:46):

Yeah, that's really interesting because obviously the work stream onboarding process is designed to be as quick and as efficient as possible, but 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 I guess the right data back from that, so each individual step can be quick and efficient and easy to complete, but by breaking it up, yeah, you get a kind of better bird's eye view of how the process is going. That's really interesting.

Christian Bankhead (11:24):

Yeah,

Daniel Blaser (11:27):

Go ahead. Oh, no, you go.

Christian Bankhead (11:29):

Well, kind of jumping into the summary here of why we do this too. I think we often forget how expensive it is to train an employee, and so we're looking for opportunities to a figure out if the training's not going to be received and then able to 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 'em a big smile and we say, get ready. It's going to be a blast, and so 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 (12:24):

Yeah, yeah. You've led it into how we designated the second tactic, which is including training, 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 jumping into the training within the onboarding process?

Christian Bankhead (12:52):

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 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 I have control of who's coming in, but what it does is it allows them to join, it gives them a summary of how we use Slack.

(13:40):

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 call 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 September 20th, 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 text message was, go back to work stream and figure out who is ready, 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?

(14:33):

Right. These are the ones I used in my previous job. Is this sufficient for the job? Hey, 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 familiarize them with what's going to happen and even project out what the next week, two weeks, three weeks looks like so that they feel prepared.

John Guldner (15:05):

And if I could just chime in on that, just hearing that is awesome, especially from the employee view, the new hire and tackling that 90 day curse. It's so easy to just think that getting hired, that's the hard part, but a lot of times people are stuck in this limbo once they complete their onboarding, they have all these anxieties about their first shift, what needs to be there, so I love that you tackle that for them and make it so they're proactive and reach out to their gm. That's something that 30, 60 days down the line, they're going to have that positive experience rather than that PTSD of. I don't remember what I was supposed to do that first week, so I'm going to definitely share that with other groups that I talked to

Christian Bankhead (15:53):

Because can we be honest? I think one of the best indicators, and I run a franchise, we make cookies. We're not hiring salary positions for every position. Our bakery, 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 going to be for me is someone who's a self-starter and I give any, 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 going to succeed. But beyond that, we've noticed that if you're agile, if you're letting the self-starters be quick, you are going to beat out your competitor who might also be fast. 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 going to 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 (17:04):

You know what, that made me think of something. 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 complete through the onboarding process just to kind of see what's going to happen. Has that ever provided you with an opportunity to identify someone who might be a good leader maybe earlier than you would've otherwise? If that makes sense?

Christian Bankhead (17:33):

It does make sense, and absolutely. I'm kind of cheating here. I have one of my business partners right next to me, his name's Jason. He works with me as well, and he does a lot of the leadership kind of reviewing and training, and I would say that it's actually probably our number one indicator of how successful they're going to 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. We want them to succeed, but they got to not be afraid of change. And honestly, getting through an onboarding should be a super easy piece of cake or a piece of cookie if we're keeping it on brand here.

(18:22):

So yeah, absolutely. I think it's a huge indicator. There's a lot of other non-leadership sort of positions in our bakery. 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. 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 got to both anticipate how many guests are going to 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 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 (19:12):

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

Christian Bankhead (19:41):

Sure. So one of the biggest incentives of the job is you're working around cookies all day. We have an employee discount, but beyond that, when employees are new, cookies are still exciting, why would we want to withhold a very easy currency to 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-park 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.

(20:31):

There's a number of pins that basically are available for them to work through. Let's talk about what my expectations are. 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 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 today. 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 going to start on day one earning pins. If they did, that'd be impressive, but day 60 by 30, I want to know that they're gaining the skills 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.

(21:18):

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 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. We're going to look for something that maybe isn't their strength, help push 'em, nudge 'em towards that to help continue and inspire that growth. Kind of when we monitor that, I feel like it gives them a sense of comfort because we got to remember from the employee side, the biggest fear is the unknown.

(22:04):

When you don't know where you are, that leaves you a lot of insecurity and potentially people could leave just simply because 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 working towards a common goal with your manager. So yeah, those are kind of our little bit of steps. I was really excited to hear that workstream always is innovating, but that there's some things there that are actually going to help us manage beyond the onboarding. And that kind spoke to me because right now to manage that 7 30, 60, 90 day benchmarks, I'm kind of getting creative. I'm letting them print out something as the last part of their onboarding. They take it with them, they manage it, but how much better would it be if I could communicate in bulk to all employees between 25 and 35 days onboarded and it's very simple and easy to do. So Yeah,

Daniel Blaser (22:57):

And I know John's excited to chat about some of those things real quickly in a minute. Before we get to that, I'd love to hear Christian about when you talk about these different milestones and these incentives, how is this program having a little bit of this structure, how is that helping you and your managers and freeing up their time?

Christian Bankhead (23:22):

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so let's look at the alternative. The alternative is the sink or swim method and there's no lifeguard on duty. You're either going to make it or you're not going to work and we're just going to let you go. And how many times as employers is that the condition we throw our new hires into? 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 don't recognize often the opportunity cost of training and hiring, even if it's subtle, even if you're only hiring one or two people a month, that opportunity cost is significant. How many less than three star reviews can we attribute to an employee who is undertrained or fairly new? 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.

(24:20):

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 going to 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 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 start implementing it with their managers.

Daniel Blaser (25:03):

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

Christian Bankhead (25:21):

Sure. 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 any automation as part of my stages of hiring, I reword it. So it's not like, congratulations Ms. Jenner, you have been selected to have an interview. I say, Hey Sarah, we're super excited to see you. Here are so times we're available. Do you want to pick one that works for you and we'll meet you at crumble? 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 because everything's automated up until the point they arrive for the interview.

(26:15):

That from the employee perspective is huge because how many spam calls do we get? How much robo junk do we get? It just gets filtered into that bucket From the other perspective, from the employee, I think it does what I said gives them the comfort to know where they're at, where they're going and how to get there. One time 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 today to say welcome to Crumble, and you're missing it. You're just kind of in your own head. You're missing the people coming in. I'm going to have to take that pin. And I was like, oh my gosh, blew me away.

(27:00):

Go manager for being 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. 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. 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. Maybe only 10% of our staff had that skill and it was detrimental to us because guess what? If you have a week where that's a really high selling cookie, those people for eight hours a day every day are frosting cookies nonstop.

(27:41):

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 wrenches the value of the job. And that's all just something we set as an expectation from the beginning, right? 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 become explicit about what we expect. And after that it does it on its own.

Daniel Blaser (28:13):

Yeah. Well, that's awesome. Before we jump into a quick demo, I just wanted to ask Christian, we are teeing this all up and it's all based around getting past that 90 day retention kind of challenge. What sort of, this is kind of off the cuff, so if you don't have the numbers or whatever off the top of your head, that's fine. I would just be curious, what sort of difference have you seen as you have implemented some of the stuff we've chatted about today as you've kind of tweaked the process and been more proactive and whatnot, what sort of difference have you seen as far as getting employees to that 90 day and then seeing them stay on for a longer period of time afterwards?

Christian Bankhead (28:57):

Sure. That's a great question. I don't have the numbers perfectly, but let me put in perspective two approaches here. When I moved from another hiring software to work stream, I saw a monumental improvement. However, when I sat down for probably two or three days and really invested in our hiring and onboarding process and customize the stages, customize the questions, asked relevant question, use the smart screening appropriately and really invested in from start to finish, customizing each pathway, I saw probably 10 or 15 times the improvement. So there are people out there right now who are probably using workstream as a hiring software who have basically just accepted the generic and I'd encourage them to sit down, take a few hours, jump in and customize it. Is there a question that your hiring manager is asking in every interview that is a indicator question. It needs to be a smart screening question on your application.

(30:04):

Is there sort of an indicator that you have among the successful hires that you're seeing, Hey, this is a common denominator among all of them. Let's go ahead and ask that upfront so we can see that. That I think makes the bigger difference than anything else. So anyone who's looking to retain employees past 90 days, if you haven't sat down and taken your onboarding yourself, like gone as an applicant, filled it out with your own information and gone through it, then I would say that's your first step and see how much fun you had. And if you didn't like it, let's start. Let's make it more fun. Let's put some things in there that'll help get through it better.

Jason (30:39):

It would be alright if I pop in a quick thought here on this one. So I'm Jason, nice to meet you. But when I first opened the crumble, we had nothing, no platform. We were literally doing indeed with Google Gmail to schedule hiring and text messages manually. And we were hiring, I was doing 500 interviews a month. I probably hired over 2000 people myself, and it was a total nightmare to track scheduling and text messaging and we're using DocuSign to get compliance documents managed and where did those go? And it was a literal disaster, right? In addition to opening a new business. And so we had to find a better solution. We picked up another platform you're probably familiar with. It was Hire Me and it solved some problems. It helped us solve the compliance piece. It helped us solve the scheduling piece of the puzzle.

(31:35):

But in the end of the day, we still had the same problem with onboarding. And what I realized, and actually what Christian's done a fantastic job of is realizing that you don't actually have an employee until the onboarding is done. And we've converted onboarding to a compliance check, but really on day one you have 5% of an employee and we say, oh, onboarding's done. Here's your 5% of your employee. And in 30 days we say, well, how are we doing? Well, we've got 50% of an employee and in 90 days our goal is to get to a hundred percent of an employee within 90 days. Someone who actually works on a regular basis in your store who's fully capable and trained. That's when onboarding ends, not when you finish the I nine form. And that is that transition that of getting to a hundred percent of an employee that I think has been our goal along. Yeah,

Christian Bankhead (32:36):

Can I throw in a tidbit for people who work in a tipped field? So if your employees receive tips, we all know that one of the greatest indicators of tips is their customer service and their sales and everything like that. But to the contrary, we actually found that the number of hours, because if we're taking total tips divided by hours worked, that has a massive indication on what their tips per hour are going to be. And so as we become more efficient at hiring better people, because they're more cross-trained, we don't have to staff with seven people because now we have five Swiss Army knives that we can put anywhere. As we cut out those two people, our tips per hour increased significantly. It would surprise people to know that, I mean, historically, some of our employees receive tips per hour of $8 an hour.

(33:29):

I mean, anybody wants a bonus of $8 per hour, right? Everyone's down. And so these employees, we often find ourselves in this trap where tips per hour is low because the quality of the employee is low. And so you can't really struggle to get the right people in. Yes, good train your people, do what you need. But it all starts with a good hiring process. As we've become more efficient in the hiring process, as we've gotten better employees who are qualified and do their job well, their pay has increased and I haven't given a raise at all. They've done it themselves by becoming more entitled to more of the tip pool. So huge benefit to work. You're not just doing it for yourself, but you're really blessing your employees when you make a qualified hiring kind of process there.

Daniel Blaser (34:15):

Yeah, I love that. That's a really good point. Alright, I think with that, John, I'd love to see just a couple of the recent updates to work stream and some of the products that have come out recently. And kind of the whole idea behind this Christian is you've shared how, in my opinion, you're really using the existing workstream products, kind of their full potential, and even you're using them in a way sometimes that I haven't heard of before. So it seems like you're making the most of them. And so really with some of these new products, we're trying to give you more tools at your disposal, and I'm sure you'll start using them in six months from now. You'll be like, oh yeah, I use 'em this way. And it'll be like, oh, that's crazy. I never even thought about that. But we'll just give you some more opportunities to really innovate, I guess. So yeah, John, I think you should be able to share your screen. Let me know if that works out on your end.

John Guldner (35:21):

Okay, perfect. So Christian, I'm just going to start with the onboarding that you've seen before, but just in case people need a bit of a refresher, an overview of what that looks like, I'll do a quick walkthrough on that and then lead into these new products that we have that touched on a lot of the things you were mentioning of how it's not really done. Once you sign your I nine, there's still a lot that needs to or that should be done in those first 90 days to get you to a hundred percent employee. I'm just going to start with this final stage of someone that's gone through the actual interview process. Once I actually mark them as hired here, I will go in and show you what it looks like on the onboarding side. So we've got a new hire here on our crumble demo account.

(36:12):

As long as the GM or whoever's doing this is dispositioning those candidates and marking 'em as hired, it's going to make it so easy to actually send those new hires out. So we can see here as soon as I click on the onboarding tab, the new hire just pops up right at the top here. So this is really, really simple and straightforward for not just the employee but also the GM that we had mentioned going from platform to platform, it can be super tedious to leave one platform and then start a new action on a new platform. So we want to just make it as straightforward and streamlined as possible here. So before I actually send the onboarding off to this new hire, I'll just quickly show that Christian was mentioning, you can add in as many of your custom forms and documents as you need here we have a really straightforward process that empowers the admins and the GMs to do it all themselves.

(37:09):

So any of your handbooks policies, training guides, you can upload those all right into the documents tab. Then when we go to the processes here, it's really simple to customize how you want your onboarding to look. I have it pretty basic right here to start and just starts with basic information signing, any company handbooks or policies, the W four i nine direct deposit, state tax withholding. But these are just like what you were mentioning more on the policy side. This covers everything that you need to have for the onboarding. But like Christian mentioned, if you want to get really, really deep down into this, you can add as many modules in as you'd like. You can break down the company documents so it's not just all in one go there, but we like to just make it so it's really straightforward to customize yourself because we know it can vary from location to location or brand to brand, but we want to empower everyone to be able to set that up how they want it there.

(38:14):

But I'll just quickly show what it looks like to send the new hire, the onboarding. So if I'm the gm, all I have to do is after letting that person know that they're going to get the job, we can send the onboarding over to them. So got the crumble, employee onboarding process, you can pick their start date, send that out. These things can be hard coded in, but for the sake of the demo, we've left it open. We can add in the compensation if you want to have the manager's name added in here or any other info, you can do that. But it's really just to make it super organized for the GM to know making sure they've got all this set up when they send it out to that new hire. So once that's sent out, they get the thumbs up notification, letting them know that they've done their job with getting that to the employee.

(39:08):

And then we can see you've left the new hire stage here. So then when we go into in progress, this is where we can actually see that it's being done right now. So this is what Christian mentioned in actually being able to track how that's going through. And this has been super, super helpful for the GMs because if you're doing well in hiring a lot of people, you likely have a lot of onboardings going on at the same time and sometimes it can feel like you sent it off and then you're just waiting to see are they going to complete it, who is actually being proactive about this and who might've dropped the ball a little bit. So as soon as a new hire actually starts filling out their information, it's going to start showing up as green and viewable once they finish any of those stages.

(39:56):

So I'm actually just going to pull up the onboarding link and show what it looks like on the applicant facing side here. This is what the new hire is going to see as soon as they start their onboarding. Looks very similar to the TurboTax style where once you save a stage, it brings you right to the next stage that you need to be on. So I'll fill out just this basic info here just so you can see what it looks like as they complete these onboardings. So finish the basic info stage that's turned green. If I had to go do something and come back to it, I would be able to just come right back to where I left off. Now here's an example of just a random onboarding form. So like a handbook that we uploaded here, and they can do this straight through their phone, really easy to sign documents, add in their name, and continue through to whether it's a next form or somewhere else in the process, they can just keep on going through.

(40:58):

As you can see, when I was pretending to be the new hire signing a couple of these stages, once I go back to the GM view here, we can see that the basic info has been completed. I can now see that it's been unlocked and I can actually view that. So obviously this would be all mandatory on a real account, but it lets, if you do have any downtime as the gm, you can go in and make sure, oh, it looks like they filled out this stage correctly with the document that I had them sign. Once that's been done, you can go in and actually see the signature form, see that they've signed it, and then with the Dropbox sign it has all the receipt in there as well. But then we can see the next step they're on right now is the W four form.

(41:45):

So it shows you right where they are and then what Christian mentions, how long they've been in certain stages. So can really separate the ones that are making their way through and the candidates that may have actually stopped or stopped actually going through the process there. And now I'll quickly go back to the final stage here of these new in progress and completed stages. So once the new hire actually completes their onboarding, they're going to pop up over here. So whether you knew it or not, Adam Sandler actually works for a crumble somewhere and he has completed has his onboarding. So we can take a look at this. If we go into view tasks, this is where you can see if the company documents were broke down into different stages. You can view each stage one by one. You can view every W four stage, the I nine stage.

(42:40):

And then like what Christian mentioned, the I nine section is very easy to complete and easy on the GM side as well. So the new hire, make sure they have their list a, B, C documents, whatever the options they chose, and then it's really easy for the GM to also complete their side of that. But I'll quickly go into this next stage, which is the documents tab, which is really exciting. So we've got Adam Sandler, he's made his way through onboarding on this team tab. This is where you're going to be able to see across your whole crumble headquarters or your crumble locations. You can break everything down with all of your employees all in one spot. You can break it down by job titles, statuses, and you can also do a lot of bulk functionality with just managing these records. But this tab is meant to be kind of the full worker profile from the point that they came in through your store and to the point that they've actually been offboarded or terminated.

(43:48):

So we can quickly pull up Adam Sandler. This is going to auto-populate all of the info that he signed or that he filled out through hiring. And the onboarding tabs, the job and pay info will all come through onboarding as well. Now with the permissions on this, you can make it so that only certain people can see some of these more sensitive information. So can be really drilled down to whether you want GMs to see certain things or admin to see certain things. And then with the documents, so all of the documents they filled out in the onboarding can be easily accessed right from here. And then this is a little teaser, but you can see assigned, this is where you can actually send real live documents and things for your current employees to sign. And you can track their progress in this section here, and I'll get to that in one second.

(44:40):

But this last little tab here is the history tab. So this is really great for a lot of people that want to just make sure everything's being recorded from the point that somebody's actually joined the store. So this is, we call it the audit proof or audit helper. If you ever need to go back and see something, any change that's ever been made with this worker is going to be timestamped by the system and it'll make sure to give a detailed information on what actually happened there. So whether it's Adam Sandler signing a company document or filling out an I nine form, the system's going to timestamp it. And then in this case, if the GM here is completing their side of the I nine form, it'll timestamp that and explain that as well. So this is really great. If you ever need to go back and make sure something was done, you're going to know that work stream timestamped it for you.

(45:32):

So we can see here at the documents tab, this is the assigned section that I wanted to show you. So the example that I'm just going to bring up here is a training manual. Sorry, the lights went out on me training manual that you'd like to send to someone after they completed training. Now, this might be different for each location or each company, but this is a pretty general example. Training was held last week and you want to send out a form to make sure everyone has signed and agreed to those new updates. So I can add a document right here, and I'm going to add, it's just a generic training signature form that I downloaded off the internet, but if you have your own form, you can add it right there. But I'm going to call this document training signature, and I'm going to put it in this trainings category.

(46:27):

So you'll be able to add in other category types if you want like handbook updates or maybe just general documents. You can do any sort of classification of these documents that you'd like. But I already created a trainings one, so I'm going to add it to that. And let's just say we need the team member themselves to sign it. You can also make it so the company has to sign it from the company side as well. So you could add a GM to that. But just for the sake of speed, we'll just do the team member on this example. So once I upload this document, I can add in similar to the way that you were able to map out signatures on the onboarding side of things, you can add in signature forms for these training agreements or forms that you want to send out.

(47:16):

So I'll just add these in here at the bottom just to show you how simple it is to add them in. And I'll go from there. So once we have this uploaded, all we have to do now, I think I got to wait for it to upload. There we go. So I've got the training signature in my documents. I can hit a sign from here. And for recipients, I can do all active team members. So in this example, my only active team members, Adam Sandler, but let's say you have 20 team members you want to send this to, you can select all of them from there. And you can include a note with this. So this is the generic note, but I could add, please sign the cookie training form from 5 3 23. So you can add in a note based off of what that is, and then you can assign it directly to the new hire or the current employee you have here.

(48:20):

So now when I go over to team and click back in on our Adam Sandler employee, when I go over into documents, we can see here assigned, we have the training signature form, and you can actually track that He has not yet signed it, but once he does sign that, it'll say all signatures have been completed and it'll be added to your documents tab on the worker profile there. So I know I walked through that pretty quickly. I'll pause just to see if you have any questions or feedback on if something like this would be useful to y'all.

Christian Bankhead (48:56):

Yeah, I see one big problem with it. What am I going to do with all my free time now that I'm not trying to scoot through? No, I think that's really cool. I like the idea that it doesn't stop when they complete their onboard pathway. In fact, we even toyed with the idea, do we create two onboardings? Do they do one, they complete it? And then at some point in time if we wanted to teach them leadership training, right? Do they go through a leadership onboarding and we almost unemployed them and then re-employ through it? This literally is my mind's getting creative now, so I can't wait to hang up and see what we can do. But let's talk about an environment where the cookies change every Monday, new skills are being introduced, new items in the bakery being introduced. And like you said, not every document needs to go to every person.

(49:41):

This offers me the control and flexibility. I'm thinking even attendance notices. I love the format for signing. So let's say someone's struggling with attendance, we put 'em on attendance, probation. This gives them an opportunity for them to recognize, Hey, here's my attendance agreement that I made in the beginning of my employment. Here's a paragraph where I get to type what I'm going to do in order to comply with it, and then I'm going to sign and date it at the end. And there's small indicators here as far as correctional and also future training that I think this can be really, really used well with, right? So

John Guldner (50:15):

I love that feedback and I can see the cogs moving as soon as I showed you that, which I love. And yeah, just a quick insight on that, we work super closely. I'm working super closely with the product team. So pretty much every customer we talk to, we send that back to the product team and they try to make it as customizable as possible. So like you mentioned, sections of disciplinary cookie trainings, all employee trainings, you can kind of break those down and get as granular as you want with that, which sounds like could be something super useful to your day-to-day operations there. Awesome. Well, I will just quickly walk you through this survey side of things. So down here at the bottom of the tab and can y'all see this? All right. Okay, so aside from documents, this is that last product here and this is just launching.

(51:06):

So we're very, very excited about this, but it's the ability to create some automated scheduled custom surveys to send out to your team. So we can see here, this would be the example of brand new crumble that has not yet created a survey, but we can click here, create survey, and here are the three that we have currently that we're starting with. So a pulse check-in. So this would be one where you can set the amount of time that you want this sent out, but it's going to send out as a text message to your employees based on the cadence that you want it to. Just asking a few. And we usually recommend not more than 10 questions, just about how they're feeling, what their pulse is at the actual store that they're working with. And they can send this out every 90 days or less depending on how often you want these pulse check-ins sent out. The next one we have is the 30 day onboarding.

(52:07):

The whole point of this is to learn how their onboarding experience was, and then if there's anything you can improve on or iterate on based off of the feedback, that's really valuable feedback that you're getting from your employees. So just a quick preview of what that would look like is it's just your 30 day onboarding asking about the experience of how it was when they went through the onboarding process and Christian and how you have mentioned it goes past just filling out those documents. It's actually as your first 30 days have been while you've been on the job. So you can set up these custom questions. We'll also have templates for it, but as customized as you want to get, you can really get some great feedback on these employees here. Now, just a quick thing I can add in here. You can set up anonymity thresholds with this.

(53:01):

So this is a way to actually get real unvarnished feedback so it's not something that someone's afraid to answer. As long as more than three people have been sent this, it's going to make sure that nobody can see who's answering those questions. So it's a really great way to get the truth from your employees about their experience there. And then the last one, this would not be anonymous, but it would just be the exit survey. So this gets sent out when someone is offboarded from workstream, and it's just going to give you a lot of insight on why they left. Some of the reasons, and you can drill down a little bit more on this now, this is something we've worked super closely with a lot of customers just asking what are the things that you wish you should have asked or you might not be tracking from your employees. And these are the first three that we're coming out with, but it'll definitely become more customizable and more robust as we start launching it to our actual customer base and keep building off of that. But those are the survey automations that we have currently that are launching this month.

Christian Bankhead (54:08):

Awesome. That looks so cool. I think that's exactly what we're looking for is something that can be set and forget, get those custom time triggers in. That's perfect. I love that. I love variables in there too. That just warms my soul. I'm seeing that we're starting from the day they first put their interest in that they're interested in working by collecting that information and allowing it to be kind of stuck to them through the whole process. That's awesome.

Daniel Blaser (54:35):

Well, I

John Guldner (54:35):

Appreciate that feedback

Daniel Blaser (54:36):

And like I said, I'm excited to chat again in six months and you can tell us all the ways that you're using these new functionalities to blow people's minds. So with that being said, I want to thank both of you for being here and chatting through all these great ideas and tips and other specific tool functionality. I think people are going to find this really helpful and hopefully get that retention a little bit better and get those first 90 days honed in. Thanks also to Jason for being a special surprise guest. I tease this the beginning, but Workstream is offering now a $50 Amazon gift card if you sign up for a demo. So if you've registered for this webinar, just check the email that you're going to get with the link to actually watch the webinar, and there'll be a link there to sign up for the demo and get a $50 gift card. I don't think crumble sells cookies on Amazon, unfortunately, but you can maybe look at some cookie related swag or something if you're filling in the mood after this. But thanks again, Christian. Thanks again, John. I appreciate it.

Christian Bankhead (55:51):

No problem. Can I just throw one last invitation out there to the hires?

Daniel Blaser (55:55):

Absolutely.

Christian Bankhead (55:55):

Anyone hiring that says employees just don't want to work anymore. You're being lazy. I used to give that excuse. Finally when I accepted I suck at hiring or I'm doing it wrong. It got better. So if those words come out of your month mouth or if they've come out of your mouth in last month, get to it. You've got work to do. The new age of an employee is different. We have to mod to 'em. We have to accommodate them, but they're out there. People do want to work.