With the challenges in today’s market, it is more important than ever to find ways to improve results. Whether that is by increasing revenue, putting a stop to employee turnover, improving customer satisfaction or making the business more efficient – your front-line employees are the ones with the power to impact this change in a material way. Recognizing the importance of this critical group is the first step to moving the needle on your results… and Shift is the 2nd step to bringing those improved results to fruition.
No matter what industry you’re in, Shift can effectively help you build better relationships with your employees as well as increase their engagement and promote feelings of satisfaction.
Building connections with employees is essential to promote more engagement
If you want employees have an authentic connection to your brand, you’ve got to start with communication
Looking to improve your business’ results? It all starts with the relationship between employees and management.
To understand how to put this strategy into motion, here are 5 ways Shift can help you achieve a deeper connection with your front-lines, and therefore improved results, at scale.
1. Successfully deliver your messages consistently to the team
As a leader, it may feel as though there isn’t a way to get your message all the way to front-line employees. Historically, this has had to go through multiple people, gets lost in translation or buried in email – so who ever knows if the message is received? And if it is received, is it what you intended? Good news – Shift can help in a variety of ways:
- Utilize a single TV screen in your employee areas to display your messages to the team – that could be in the form of a static spotlight, integrated data, or even a video
- Enable them to hear your message, understand your direction, believe in what you stand for, and follow your lead – this is the power of the digital presentation of messaging through a TV
- Whether it is the company vision & mission, a new training, or HR updates (benefits, payroll, etc.) – the digital display provides a perfect channel for bite-size information that the team will easily consume throughout their shift as they frequently pass by the screen
- Use it to promote key company initiatives like leadership training, new products and processes, or celebrating company achievements and milestones
- The employees want to hear from you – they are hungry for communication and to understand the company that they are a part of… and this is now within reach
- Shorten the distance between you and the front-lines – Shift brings you closer than ever
2. When your team members are acutely aware of the goals and results, they are far more likely to achieve them
There are lots of ways you can call out hard work and employee accomplishments such as:
- Leaderboards
- Consistent improvements in KPIs
- Updated dashboards – let them know real-time how far they have to go to achieve key goals
3. Integrations and automation will help reduce the manual work in communication
We’re in a digital age, so why should communicating with your front-line staff be any different? With Shift you can keep information up to date and relevant, and you don’t need hours of training to effectively use it.
- Birthday and anniversary announcements – never miss their special days
- Friendly competition with leaderboards, sales challenges; celebrate employees and their accomplishments
- Show areas of strength and potential improvement with customer satisfaction scores and competitions
- Promote teamwork within the location with store vs. store competition
- Highlight achievements within the team like promotions or awards
- Utilize existing content like trainings, marketing materials and videos in bite-size clips to ensure these are reinforced and received by the employees over time
- A whole host of features will help you plan ahead – from dayparting to day of week and advanced scheduling, you can spend only 15 minutes and have a full week’s calendar of content for your team… planned out exactly where and when you want them live!
- Drag & drop functionality paired with a Canva integration makes developing content easier than ever – it takes less time than printing out emails and pinning them to a board (note: keep reading for more on how to resolve bulletin board drama 😉)
- Shift offers a wide variety of ‘quick start’ templates that will pull in your branding, meaning you don’t need to be a graphic designer to easily utilize the software.
Digitize the bulletin board and help both front end and back in restaurant staff stay informed about policies, company goals, recognitions, employee content, and more - all creating an impact on your culture and overall satisfaction.
4. Empowering the team to have a voice with employee-generated content contributes to a positive work culture.
Help employees build bonds amongst themselves with call outs and recognitions—when they have a say in content, they’re much more likely to engage.
- Shift is a catalyst for your front-lines to develop meaningful relationships with their team members
- Early friends mean longer-lasting employees – a connection to the people is a connection to the company. Employee Bios provide a perfect way for a new team member to introduce themselves and quickly develop friendships!
- Shoutouts are a great feature to promote a great culture of camaraderie and appreciation for one another—someone covered your shift? Easily use the shoutout feature to publicly show your appreciation!
- With employee of the month or recognition programs, Shift makes it easy to congratulate them across your network in one swoop, ultimately building a positive work culture and environment.
It’s easier than ever to customize messages and get your staff the information they need to feel like they’re a part of a team. Image courtesy of Shift.
5. Custom hierarchy for your specific organization means you can send a message to everyone, only one location or anything in between!
No two organizations are the same, which is why Shift can be easily customized to meet your business where it’s at.
- Testing out a new product or solution for a subset of your locations? Shift makes it easy to post communication just one time, and get the message to the right teams. Whether it’s by district, region, all locations or only one – you decide who the message goes to.
- Broadcast your corporate company meeting so the team hears from the CEO, or send a specific training message to a store that has struggled in that area… customization and personalization is just one of the key features in the platform
BONUS: Replace outdated bulletin boards – it’s time to SHIFT to digital
- The data and information is so often out-of-date that the employees have stopped checking them
- It takes time and bandwidth of the store managers to print these pages out, not to mention the paper costs to maintain it
- Reduce those costs and get this information to the employees in a format they prefer – DIGITAL, that doesn’t require the time of the Store Manager to update
- Makes the entire process more efficient and incredibly effective without the use of a messy, paper filled bulletin board that can oftentimes become wallpaper.
How will you use Shift to deepen employee connection and build your brand?
Communication is key with your front-line employees, so make sure you’re taking advantage of all the perks Shift has to offer. When your employees are engaged they have the tools they need to excel and promote your brand.
