High hourly worker turnover rates & low employee engagement cost franchise operators dearly. An LMS can streamline employee onboarding & a positive employee experience

Franchise operators face high hourly worker turnover rates and costly consequences from low employee engagement. A learning management system (LMS) can help streamline employee onboarding and training, the first step in building a positive and rewarding employee experience.

Franchise operators are up against many challenges in today’s economy: labor shortages, economic constraints, and high hourly worker turnover rates. The constant turnover can be an expensive proposition, with Gallup estimating that voluntary turnover costs U.S. companies more than $1 trillion annually. 

To reduce turnover rates and curtail costs, franchise operators must prioritize investing in a positive and rewarding employee experience, starting on the first day with onboarding and training. A modern learning management system (LMS) can streamline employee onboarding and training while simultaneously enhancing overall engagement and effectiveness.

Friction on the Job Leads to Higher Turnover

According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, January 2023 ended with 10.8 million job openings but only 6.4 million hires were made. Within that gulf of open jobs, hourly work simply doesn’t stand out — many perceive these jobs as “thankless” and not worth pursuing.

Part of this perception stems from how franchises train and manage their hourly workers. Hourly workers won’t tolerate inefficient processes on the job. And inefficiencies through minor friction points can sneak into every aspect of a franchise worker’s shift. 

For instance, workers will get worn out if they have to remember multiple passwords for point solutions and switch between several different applications. This activity is called context-switching, and too much of it kills productivity, stresses people out, and ruins concentration. According to a study published by Harvard Business Review, the average user toggles between apps and websites about 1,200 times every day. When each toggle takes up two seconds, a worker loses up to four hours per week just switching between platforms. That time could have been spent helping customers, restocking shelves, or conducting other customer-centric activities.

And that’s one example of a typical friction point hourly workers face. If managers don’t address compounding friction, employees become dissatisfied and leave — sometimes in weeks, if not days.

How can Franchise Operators Reduce Friction — and Shrink their Tech Stacks, too?

Managers then bear the burden of hiring and training new workers for the same positions over and over again. They waste their resources on constant training duties without much return instead of improving customer service and efficiency.

There might be a new point solution readily available to help resolve this challenge, but tech stacks are already bloated enough. Having workers use yet another tool keeps them trapped in context-switching, slowing down productive work and reducing satisfaction. Not to mention, you pay the costs of more tools and lost productivity.

A longer-term solution begins by removing friction from your employee experience, which an audit of your processes can help uncover. A great place to start is the employee onboarding experience.

Use an LMS for an Onboarding Experience that Energizes your Employees

An easily accessible LMS lets you centralize all training resources and seamlessly combine learning materials with practical experience to simplify onboarding. Incorporating quizzes, exercises, and role-playing through an LMS’s interactive learning software enhances employees’ learning experience, resulting in more effective training. Managers see employees’ performances and can more accurately identify where specific coaching or training would help the most. According to a survey by BambooHR, employees who experience effective onboarding feel up to 18 times more committed to their workplace, meaning you can realize a return on this investment quickly.

You should choose an LMS purpose-built to operate within an all-in-one platform designed specifically for franchises. After reducing friction with onboarding, this platform lets you easily focus on other major friction points in daily operations. Shift scheduling, policy enforcement, facility maintenance, and team communications can all run through one place. Information, including training data used in your LMS, lives in a resource repository that workers can call upon at any time.  

Employees can more conveniently access crucial messages, policies and training, while managers can gather and use data for important business decisions. The likelihood of errors in scheduling, ordering, and elsewhere drop. Streamlining your technology infrastructure enhances your employee experience and your culture.

End the Hiring Loop with an all-in-one Solution

Free managers from the endless toil of training and make your employees’ lives easier with a modern LMS integrated into an all-in-one, day-to-day operations solution. With how crucial limiting turnover is in a tight labor market, this system can reduce friction points, improve employee morale and help realize stronger business results.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Matt Goebel

Founder and CEO of Woven

Matt Goebel is the Founder and CEO of Woven. Woven empowers franchisors and franchisees to maximize unit economics at scale by digitally unifying the frontline workforce, connecting the management of people, operations and facilities in a single app. Prior to Woven, Matt worked as a consultant within Franchising for over a decade providing strategic IT vision and software solutions to franchisors and franchisees. Matt became a multi-unit franchisee in 2016 with his wife Cristina, in Indianapolis, Indiana. As a Franchisee, Matt understood the challenges of keeping track of the many tools needed to manage his people, operations, locations, and facilities. Unable to find comprehensive franchise management software to support his needs, he created a solution under one platform in Woven. Today, he and his wife Cristina live and breathe the world of multi-unit franchising while Matt helps other multi-unit operators scale their businesses efficiently through Woven.