The secret to better recruitment and retention
Struggling to find and keep good employees? Take a closer look at your company culture, experts say
and behave and how they show up,” Stover said. “For Shake Shack, our culture is really about creating an elevated experience for our guests, but more importantly it’s about taking care of our teams.” Stover said Shake Shack recently has had more than 2,800 employees advance to new opportunities within the company, some of whom had been through the company’s Shift Up program to help train new managers. “We practice what we call enlightened hospitality,” Stover added. “Essentially it’s about priority being placed on the people that work in your organization. And when you take care of them, they’re going to take care of every other stakeholder that’s part of your ecosystem.” Lawlor said Smokey Bones measures success of its culture by doing annual surveys and pulse questions for hourly workers when they clock in. In addition, the Smokey Bones executive team has conducted a virtual town hall meeting with managers across the company every Thursday since April 2020, during the early weeks of the pandemic. “We provide a business update,” Lawlor explained. “We give functional updates. … Then at the end we have a Q&A session. We take the hard questions and a lot of the things that helped us shape and navigate our actions throughout the pandemic came out of these sessions. …. We find out so much information from our field leaders and by breaking down the communication barriers in establishing trust with them on that we have to be able to respond in a meaningful way.”
Ron Ruggless Senior Editor
Culture can help foodservice companies recruit and retain employees, restaurant leaders said during “Culture: Your Single Point of Difference,” a panel session at CREATE: The Future of Foodservice in Denver.
The panelists included: Dave Boennighausen, CEO of Broomfield, Colo.-based Noodles & Company; Meredith Cagigal, vice president
Watch the Culture Panel Content Here!
of foodservice channel strategy and execution at the Atlanta-based Coca-Cola Co.; Hal Lawlor, chief operations officer of Aventura, Fla.-based Smokey Bones; and Idris Stover, director of diversity, equity, inclusion and culture at New York-based Shake Shack. It was moderated by Sam Oches, editor in chief of Nation’s Restaurant News.
Culture be difficult to define, they said, but Stover provided a succinct explanation: “It’s the beliefs and the values that translate into behaviors that drive decision-making to drive the environment in which people work and ultimately that impacts the guests.” can Employees need “to feel and touch our culture, because it’s how people will act
“Every aspect of our lives is so personalized. [Employees] want that type
of personal experience.”
Dave Boennighausen CEO, Noodles & Company
Cagigal said Coca-Cola managers work to remain engaged with employees quarterly as well as
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