Client: A restaurant chain with 8 locations across Ontario

Sector: Hospitality

Responsibilities: Research & Strategy, Survey Design

Challenge: A restaurant chain was experiencing high employee turnover in the wake of COVID-19 and wanted to understand its employees’ experiences and areas of opportunity to improve employee retention.

Methodologies: Expert interview, Secondary data analysis, Environmental scanning, Co-creation

Project duration: 12 weeks

When restaurants were permitted to re-open after COVID-19-related closures, the Leadership team at this restaurant noticed a higher level of employee turnover among its restaurant employees. This led to an urgent need to understand the underlying reason in order to reduce turnover.

I led the design of a customized engagement survey, analyze the data, and make recommendations enabling the restaurant to make meaningful changes to the employee experience.

This was the restaurant's first ever survey and attempt at seeking formal employee feedback.

In addition, the scope of the engagement was limited to just a survey, preventing us from running individual interviews and using other methods that could provide additional/deeper insights.

Expert Interviews:

The sole point of contact on the project was a Leadership team member who had previously worked at the restaurant. I utilized our meetings to learn about the business and its employees’ experiences from an individual with first-hand knowledge of the restaurant and corporate work experience.

Over the course of multiple meetings, I asked questions to understand the existing climate at the organization and unique organizational practices. I inquired about the feedback culture since this was the Restaurant’s first engagement survey. Past client experiences have taught me that there could be apprehension or a lack of confidence in surveys if employers demonstrate a pattern of inaction after receiving feedback.

Secondary Research:

To generate the right questions, I looked to several sources:

The restaurant did not conduct exit interviews with departing restaurant workers. This presented a significant gap in understanding how the experiences of former employees might mirror that of the current employee group.

Due to the absence of general feedback and exit interview data, I combed through the pages of the restaurant’s Glassdoor page for past and current employee feedback to see if there were obvious themes that might help us understand general perceptions and experiences of its employees and reveal specific areas where we might want to probe, independent of departures that might have been due to COVID-19.

In addition, news reports showed that other restaurants were also experiencing high turnover. I then searched various publications for articles on restaurant workers who had left the industry since COVID-19 to learn about their experiences.

I reviewed data from Statistics Canada and past studies conducted by independent organizations such as ‘Restaurants Canada’ to understand the impact of COVID-19 on the Canadian restaurant landscape and to help provide more context on the employee group we were going to survey.

Another critical source of information was the restaurant’s employee handbook and policies, which were reviewed to understand existing practices, ranging from health and safety protocols to hospitality-specific norms such as tipping.

The combination of conversations and external research enabled me to develop an initial set of questions organized by category (e.g. health and safety, working during covid-19, restaurant management etc.), which was shared with our primary contact for feedback. Revisions were made driven by their feedback and new insights from the above-mentioned sources.

One of the most impactful pieces of feedback I received and incorporated, was to edit the survey language to be more accessible due to participants whose first language was not English. We updated the language to be plainer and, in doing so, made the survey more accessible for other employee groups too.

We also explored ways in which employees could be motivated to provide honest feedback about their experiences since this was the first time a survey like this was being launched. For some questions, a short introduction was included about why that specific question was being asked. For example, for a question asking the survey participants to identify their race - we shared that “the Restaurant partners with employment agencies seeking to connect immigrant groups with employment opportunities. We want to see how effectively we’ve hired individuals born and raised outside of Canada”.

It was a balancing act between our clients' needs (the restaurant's leadership team) and the elements we had identified as important to the employees.

We also attached a description to each new category of questions to make the survey as transparent as possible and show no hidden agenda. For example, we would introduce a new section stating, “The next set of questions are about your perception of health and safety at the restaurant”.

Ultimately, we arrived at a comprehensive survey with 12 distinct sections that spoke to different elements of the employee experience. The categories were a mix of standard categories proven to reflect an individual’s level of engagement and new categories more specific to the restaurant and the restaurant industry in Toronto.

The questions were mainly closed-ended, with pre-defined responses from which participants could choose. We chose this for a few reasons, including enabling the restaurant to ask similar questions in future surveys. Another reason was to benchmark the data with our other clients and generate quantitative insights. However, we also included open-ended questions to add context to the close-ended questions and as a means for us to hear feedback directly from employees in their voices.

We included an introduction to the survey itself where we acknowledged how challenging it has been for restaurant workers over the past two years since the start of COVID-19 and shared that the survey intends to learn about their experiences because the restaurant wanted to do better.

We emphasized that the responses would only be accessible to my immediate team to encourage participation, as we had learned that there might have been a certain level of distrust among restaurant employees when engaging with initiatives driven by the leadership team.

Since the survey was to be shared across the entire organization, we designed the questions so that certain groups of questions could be skipped if they did not apply to corporate employees or restaurant employees. Finally, we emphasized that the time to complete the survey will be paid. The survey was rolled out using the restaurant’s internal communication tool.

We received less than a 70% participation rate, the lowest survey participation rate my team had encountered. This was indicative of a few things, including the climate of the organization at the time, the gap between my team as external partners and the individuals being surveyed, the novelty of the idea of an engagement survey at the Restaurant, and the research methodology.

The results showed that while the individuals who participated were engaged to an extent, many others were disengaged. Based on the respondents, we identified strong themes employee-wide and at specific restaurant locations.

Considering a mix of the frequency of some aspects of feedback and the ripple effect that changing one area could have on other areas, we were able to prioritize each identified problem area. We made recommendations based on past client work, employee recommendations shared in the open-ended questions and independent research on the hospitality sector.

These recommendations were shared with our primary contact for their feedback. We also came up with suggestions on how to amplify already existing practices that employees enjoyed.

We had two broad umbrellas of recommendations - quick wins and projects. The quick wins were intended to boost the team’s confidence in the restaurant’s ability to listen and take action. The projects were longer-term system changes that would require more of a mindset shift, more resources to implement, and a bigger opportunity for impact.