Ask any operator about staffing and prepare to hand over some Tylenol.
“In the corporate world managers typically say the first 90 days make or break the employee experience, but for restaurant operators who need to staff the front line, it can be seven to 10 days,” said Cristian Grossman, co-founder and CEO of Beekeeper, an employee-app platform, in an interview. “You need to get employees quickly up to speed and engage them or they’re going to bow out in a couple weeks.”
Beekeeper by LumApps unifies communication, operations and HR to connect frontline workers with the people and tools they need to become acclimated.
“We create personalized journeys,” he said. “It’s different than just giving someone a huge binder and saying, Here you go, read it. People are like, What should I do with this? We chunk that off into smaller pieces. We digitize it and make it a fun and digestible experience. Instead of getting everything on the first day, we spread out the content. We want to help people hit the ground running while learning other things over time.”
Imagine you’re on day one at a QSR and flustered with all the new information being thrown at you. If the establishment works with Beekeeper, you will have access to an app that provides information on shifts and schedules as well as HR policies and tips on productivity. “It’s like a Swiss Army Knife in your pocket,” said Grossman.
The app can help managers straddle two worlds.“Often they go between corporate and the frontline,” he said. “They go from the computer, print something, put it on a bulletin board, report back. There are a lot inefficiencies.”
The company boasts that in using its platform managers can save seven hours a week. The value can be realized even before new employees start. “Pre-onboarding is just as important as onboarding,” he said.
The time in between an employee accepting an offer and showing up for a first day is not guaranteed. Sometimes background checks still need to be done. Or a start date established. That gap can extend from a couple weeks to a couple months. And then all bets are off.
“To give you a sense of how big that issue is, we’ve worked with a company where 70 percent of people hired ended up not showing up,” he said. “When we gave it the Beekeeper app for hires to download, pre-boarding engagement improved. We were able to get that number down to 35 percent for it, which is still a lot, but an improvement.”
And with potential for continued improvement as the app itself learns on the job.
“As we move forward with a client, the app starts to understand a lot of the data patterns and a lot of the information,” he said. “Then we can continue to tailor learning patterns for each person. It may be that certain employees prefer to read company updates in the morning and not the tasks. Or maybe it’s the other way around. We can personalize the home screen, which is built with AI. We can optimize the experience for employees.”
All with the goal of convincing the person to show up and stick around.
“Our goal is basically to give an employee an AI assistant,” he said. “We believe frontline workers should have something that can say, Hey, we know you’re going to have this job today, but you’re lacking the certification for that topic, so here you go. Here’s a clip that you can watch. Or if you’re gone for a few days, here’s a summary of what happened. That’s the type of philosophy that we want to democratize for the frontline.”
