Three years ago, Minneapolis-based Caribou Coffee was losing hours of productivity each week to inefficient scheduling—an issue many quick-service restaurants can relate to. Although the brand had a scheduling system in place, it didn’t alleviate the burden of creating and maintaining schedules. In fact it often created additional labor challenges, largely because the schedules were not created based on need.
“The system generated schedules based on the estimated amount of time it would take to make our products and would say we needed 4–6 employees scheduled at a time,” says Kim Olson, product manager for BOH systems at Caribou Coffee. “But it didn’t break that down and say we needed a manager, a greeter, and baristas.”
This meant managers had to guess where employees should go. Additionally, when managers created schedules they couldn’t see how much payroll would cost until the system tabulated it the next day, leading to overspending. When stores borrowed employees from other stores for coverage, the borrowed employees often went into overtime. Team members were also frustrated by the system because they had to visit the store to check their schedules.
“We had managers who weren’t included in the initial pilot beg to be included, because with Teamworx, team members walk into a shift knowing where they need to be and how they would fit in with the rest of the team.”
“There was no way for our team members to interact with our system,” Olson says. “There were Post-It Note wars on random calendars in the back, and time-off requests appeared after schedules were made.”
That’s why Caribou Coffee looked for another platform to alleviate some of this burden. Now the brand uses CrunchTime! Teamworx across its 326 Caribou Coffee locations and 154 Bruegger’s Bagels locations. Caribou was already using CrunchTime for other business functions for more than a decade, so the transition to the Teamworx platform was seamless.
“We had managers who weren’t included in the initial pilot beg to be included, because with Teamworx, team members walk into a shift knowing where they need to be and how they would fit in with the rest of the team,” Olson says. “You save time there, and team members come in better prepared.”
Additionally, while Olson says it used to take each manager up to an hour and a half each week to generate schedules, it now only takes 30 minutes. The system provides additional time benefits as well, such as eliminating confusion about time-off requests and shift swaps because employees can request those directly in the system or seeing payroll costs immediately. Because Teamworx also integrates with the company’s HR system, managers can post open positions, recruit, and interview candidates within the HR platform. Teamworx integrates automatically at a cadence based on their configuration. This makes sense for their managers, who no longer have to manually enter employee information, eliminating the potential for errors.
New stores have the added benefit of copying schedule templates from other stores so they no longer have to guess what their initial schedules should be. Team members also enjoy checking schedules remotely, and because the entire company shares the tool, there is no risk of accidental overtime when employees are borrowed by other stores.
“Now that we have Teamworx in every store, we have the best people in the best positions for every shift,” Olson says. “The deployment is a major part of increasing our guest satisfaction scores, because our team members are happier and we’re able to work more efficiently with our team.”
By Peggy Carouthers
