Attracting and retaining talent has long been an issue in the quick-service industry, and the pandemic has only made it more challenging. Employees have left the industry in droves thanks at least in part to enhanced unemployment benefits, while meanwhile, minimum wage has only risen.
Consider the hurdles facing a franchisee like Alexander C. Johnson, CEO of Pretzel Power. Owner of five Auntie Anne’s and five Cinnabon locations in the Bay Area, Johnson and his team have had to shutter mall-based stores for weeks and even months during COVID-induced lockdowns. At the same time, minimum wage has steadily risen by over 30 percent in some Bay Area municipalities over the past several years, now ranging from $15.06 in Oakland to $17.13 in neighboring Emeryville. And yet, Johnson reports that morale at his stores has never been higher.
So what is Johnson’s secret weapon? Last year he implemented zignyl, a restaurant management solution that’s designed to help multi-unit, multi-brand operators like himself incentivize employees. He says zignyl has helped him become an employer of choice by paying employees extra wages on days when sales spike.
“I’m a big believer in meritocracy and that people should be rewarded for working hard,” Johnson says. “zignyl was a way for us to not just do something arbitrary and increase wages for the sake of doing it, but it helps us move the needle by saying, ‘Here, this is extra money for every hour you worked and helped the store be more successful.’ The buy-in is not just with the store manager but the entire team which is focused on getting that extra money.”
zignyl has various capabilities. It helps digitize human resources records, scheduling across multiple stores and brands, and excels at helping automate forecasting. Its biggest separation from rival apps, though—and the very reason it was created—is its ability to incentivize employees with bumps in hourly pay based on certain sales thresholds. It’s a way for operators to pay employees more based entirely on store performance.
“The way I always say it is that you’re paying employees a part of the money you weren’t expecting to make that day anyway,” says Matt Forbush, founder of zignyl and a franchisee himself. “So the employee gets more money and they are happy, but your store is still keeping 90 percent of whatever you weren’t expecting to make. So you win and your employees win, too.”
Here’s how it works at Johnson’s restaurants: Pretzel Power offers each employee an extra $1 an hour if sales are 15 percent above Johnson’s forecast for the day. If sales are 20 percent higher than the forecast, employees receive $1.50 more an hour, and if they are over 25 percent, it’s an extra $2 per hour.
The platform also helps aggregate and distribute digital tips to employees, and many of Johnson’s employees make $20 an hour or more, matching rival industries—in the first month zignyl was up and running in his stores, Johnson paid out over $30,000 to employees in incentives alone. What Johnson likes most about zingyl’s incentives, however, is the camaraderie it instills in team members.
“It is truly amazing what this has done at my stores,” Johnson says. “They are constantly going and tracking how close they are to certain sales thresholds—the zignyl tablet breaks it down into hourly increments and any employee can see how close they are to certain pay bumps per hour. I’ll be in a store and a transaction will take place and the bagger will lean over to the cashier and say, ‘Hey, why didn’t you try to upsell this product?’”
Johnson also reports occasions when employees are done with their shift and they call the store and ask where the sales were at for the day—there’s a buy-in amongst his staff now, where the store’s success is their own. This is exactly what zignyl was designed to do—created by Forbush, a multi-unit, multi-brand operator himself, the software was meant to be his own solution to a clutter of spreadsheets tracking hourly pay bumps. After finding zignyl immensely useful, it was brought to market as a resource for other franchisees.
For franchisees like Johnson, zignyl has been a perfect solution to the industry’s turnover rate. The software, he says, lowers his labor costs and bolsters the bottom line.
“Here’s a way to change employee behavior and get better ROI,” Forbush says. “We ultimately do that through two ways—incentivizing employees and giving them transparency into store sales. These things get employees to show up to work and to really try their best to increase sales. And guess what? It works. It ultimately pays them more and yet it lowers your labor percentages. I know that’s counterintuitive, but we’ve seen it time and time again.”
For more information on how zignyl keeps employees engaged, visit the zignyl website.
By Charlie Pogacar
