Creating authentic connections within teams can be challenging, primarily when team members work different shifts in different locations. Meanwhile, conveying consistent, timely, and important information to employees can increase productivity and communication.

Jose Vazquez Barquet, vice president and business development agent at Subway Restaurants Puerto Rico and CEO of Caribbean Franchise, has found a platform to facilitate back-of-house communication, Shift. Now using this product in 44 of his Subway locations, Barquet has noticed positive results, including improved employee engagement and active communication.

Before adopting this new technology, the only way Barquet and his restaurant managers were able to communicate with their employees was through a bulletin board. “So when I saw Shift, I thought, this is a 21st-century way of communicating with employees. That’s what ultimately sparked my interest,” Barquet says. He began by replacing the old-school bulletin boards in five of his locations with new TVs powered by Shift. “We did that for about a month and had very good feedback, so we slowly expanded. Now we’ve implemented 44 locations,” Barquet says.

Shift is a digital bulletin board that works by plugging the device into a TV in the back of the house. Once set up, the TV can broadcast various content, including messages from restaurant managers. “The platform allows managers and employees to communicate with each other. For example, a manager could post, ‘Thank you, Janet, for the great help you gave in closing last night,’” Barquet says.

Through these messages, communications between restaurant managers and their employees have increased and become more efficient. This, in turn, allows for more cohesion and camaraderie within the workplace.

“Subway also generates a lot of very useful content that we can upload to the screens,” Barquet says. “This includes training videos, the current LTO promotion, new products, new TV commercials, and social media videos, so all we need to do is upload it,” The ability to use already available content allows store-level and franchise-level managers to save time, and creates seamless top-down community in the back-of-house.

Shift can also facilitate friendly competition and increase workplace productivity. “The restaurant managers can announce when the restaurant achieves record sales or a particular goal or objective. It opens a new communication channel to the restaurant staff, especially compared to the old-school bulletin boards,” Barquet says.

Organizing communication between various franchise locations can be quite daunting, which is why Barquet uses Shift’s function to differentiate messages across all his restaurants. “You can place messages for an individual store, for a group of stores, for just one brand or just one corporate entity,” Barquet says. “For instance, in our case, the 44 Subways are spread among two major corporations. Therefore, one corporation may have a message for its employees, and the other may send something completely different.”

The diversity of the platform showcases itself in multiple ways, all of which ultimately lead to satisfactory results. For example, using the device to connect employees of multiple generations across multiple locations.

“It’s a very powerful tool. It can work either for a single restaurant owner or for a multi-unit owner and also for a restaurant group,” Barquet says. “I see it as a more modern, contemporary tool to communicate with your employees. Our Gen Z and millennial employees especially love to interact with our Shift.”

For more information on back-of-house communication support, visit the Shift website.