Leverage Incentives Programs to Overcome the Hiring Crisis

As a multi-unit franchisee with 45 restaurants across seven brands, the uncertainty of the past year could have been unbearable. Each day, I read news stories about the restaurant industry hiring crisis, with talent demanding higher wages, and many offering competitive signing bonuses in order to attract employees. 

Across my restaurants, we had to come up with new strategies to recruit and retain employees. We have implemented an incentives program which has allowed us to incentivize employees to drive sales, which includes higher performance and makes their work more engaging and rewarding. In some ways, it’s like profit sharing — our employees make more money when the restaurant performs better — so our full teams are motivated to do their best work, focus on upsells, and even take on the less desirable shifts in the interest of taking home a higher wage. 

We were fortunate to already have a great system in place when the pandemic struck, which has positioned us well to…