Ensuring Franchise Consistency With All-in-one HCM Tech Adoption

Ensuring Franchise Consistency With All-in-one HCM Tech Adoption

While no two franchise setups look alike, one thing remains true: operational consistency is key to delivering an amazing guest experience across the entire business. Inconsistencies in products, processes, and measuring success hinders a franchisor’s ability to drive optimal business performance both at the unit level and for the franchise as a whole.

Most franchises utilize different technologies throughout their locations. While disjointed setups can (and often do) work, they enable unscalable operations and can hinder the performance potential for individual locations. Not to mention fragmentation severely complicates analytics and reporting for franchisors and corporate.

On top of this, joint employer laws threaten to redirect wage and scheduling lawsuits at franchisors, causing major franchises to rapidly adopt technology that enables consistent operations across the entire chain.

In short, franchisees need an off-the-shelf solution that is fully configured for individual and franchise-level needs to avoid confusion, ensure consistency, and promote retention. Without this, they will lack the valuable operational insight needed to optimize and excel in everything from talent acquisition to labor distribution.

Franchise-wide data transparency

Franchisors running multi-location operations know that the ability to segment data at the store AND franchise levels is critical. Think of how many daily, weekly, and monthly processes your business reports on. Does your organization use a singular platform for franchisors to view store-level performance? 

Labor costs, employee performance, sales, hiring metrics, compliance requirements, and much more need to be captured and measured to truly understand a franchise’s performance and trajectory. 

An all-in-one HCM platform can zoom out to highlight key data insights across all aspects of business, such as for corporate or franchisors that need to understand which stores are performing best, and why. It also can dive deep into granular analytics so franchisees can identify efficiencies or gaps in processes and optimize accordingly. 

Is location 1 doing an excellent job maintaining labor efficiency? Dive into their scheduling and timeclock analytics to understand what’s working, then apply those processes to other franchise locations. Maybe another location has exceptional time-to-hire metrics for new hires when the rest of your franchisees are struggling to move talent along the pipeline. There’s an opportunity to learn how that franchisee approaches talent acquisition and share best practices with other managers in your group.

On the flip side, maybe you require franchisees to turn in monthly labor cost and compliance reports, but some stores won’t hand in the metrics. An all-in-one HCM platform built for franchise setups can enable franchisors to independently pull necessary data across their stores, eliminating data gaps caused by franchisee hesitation.

Franchise data consistency brings endless benefits, but you can’t get to optimizing if your franchise data across all HCM processes aren’t centralized into a singular platform.

Compliant employee scheduling and labor fluidity

When running a multi-location franchise, labor and scheduling management is no small task. What times does each location reach peak service? Can an employee work in multiple locations? Is there a corporate-required scheduling template that you must follow? Are your schedules compliant with Fair Workweek and other labor laws? The list of considerations goes on.

Wage and labor compliance for hospitality franchises

While a standard scheduling tool can ease some of the pain from this process, an all-in-one HCM platform is the best way to create labor-efficient, compliant scheduling that also enables fluidity. 

Say you’re managing multiple locations covering several states and time zones. Now say your franchise hires minors, who are subject to varying tiers of child labor laws. Navigating compliance requirements is a job in itself, and scheduling is far from the only thing on your managers’ plates. 

An all-in-one HCM platform takes every key bit of information into consideration to build effective schedules. Federal and local labor laws, employee pay rate, shift start and end time (to consider overtime), and more are combined with predicted service demand, employee skills, and pre-set franchise requirements to quickly generate the best possible schedule for each franchise location. And the right HCM platform will generate labor costs in real-time during the scheduled building process so franchisors can approve labor costs if and when necessary.

But hospitality is an unpredictable industry and no schedule is set in stone. Schedules will need to be adjusted at the last minute, putting franchises at risk of violating labor laws like Fair Workweek — which tend to target larger businesses.

The beauty of an all-in-one HCM platform is that it takes all employee logistics into consideration to paint a full picture of compliance. Shift start and end times, employee breaks, overtime, and more should be automatically factored in during the scheduling building process to ensure headache-free compliance.

Ensure franchise-wide labor fluidity

Hospitality franchises with one or more locations within driving distance of each other have the unique ability to possess a fluid workforce. If one location is short-staffed, it can borrow employees from nearby locations to cover service gaps.

An intelligent scheduling platform should be able to take this into consideration, such as when employees call out on vacation or during on-the-fly schedule changes when someone calls out sick. But if the platform can manage employee-initiated shift swaps and voluntary standby lists, a franchisee’s potential labor pool grows significantly. 

But these processes should be hassle-free for managers. If a shift opens up, available and qualified employees should have the ability to volunteer to pick it up before managers need to reorganize the schedule. If an employee thinks they’ll be unable to attend a shift, they should have the ability to automatically swap shifts with another employee working the same position — both of which can be approved before being confirmed. Mobile apps integrated with an all-in-one HCM platform enable this level of unparalleled fluidity for a truly flexible workforce.

Stronger macro and micro level communications

Without a consistent communication platform, franchise-wide messaging is easily lost. It’s completely understandable — franchisees overseeing hundreds of employees might not have a singular channel to easily push out messages to every team member. Top-down messaging from corporate might be missed by franchisors and their service-level employees alike. 

These communications disruptions are common. But without consistent communication, how is a franchise supposed to maintain consistency amongst all of the different locations?

Key messaging at the timeclock and via mobile

The timeclock is the singular piece of technology that all employees are guaranteed to interact with. Whether someone works front of house or back of house, your workers still need to clock into and out of their shifts, making the timeclock an ideal communications tool.

Franchisors or corporate can and should use the timeclock to send company-wide notifications to employees of all levels. If there are new franchise-wide promotions, giveaways, safety policies, or other special initiatives, consistency amongst eligible franchises is key. The timeclock can be utilized in tandem with corporate communications to ensure team members of all levels get the memo.

An all-in-one HCM platform enables this widespread communication as well as unit-level messaging. Rather than scrambling for phone numbers or creating unofficial group messages in WhatsApp or GroupMe, a dedicated mobile app allows managers and team members to connect on the record via their mobile devices. Franchisees and employees can easily contact each other regarding shift questions, team availability, store-focused initiatives, and more, while still holding a strong degree of professional accountability.

Tech consolidation for streamlined, cost-efficient HCM processes

Disparate HCM and WFM franchise systems are the quickest way to hinder cross-functional efforts. Some of the top-performing hospitality franchises consolidate some, if not all, processes into a singular platform to ensure operational efficiency and long-term savings.

Frictionless franchise operations

Whether you manage one, ten, or one hundred franchises, frictionless operations are key to running a high-performing business. But this can be tricky in the franchise world, especially when compliance concerns can vary greatly depending on city or state. Although no two stores will operate the same, a certain level of consistency is required to ensure profitability and long-term success. 

Managing HCM processes as a franchisee is difficult in its own right, but using fragmented point solutions to manage operations creates enormous openings for inefficiencies and user error. Trying to remember twelve different logins for systems that don’t talk to one another adds an entire layer of frustration on top of this.

And at the franchisor level, measuring success across your locations is near impossible if your franchisees are collectively utilizing 20+ technologies and 50+ unique workflows. An all-in-one HCM platform is necessary to consolidate disparate systems into one streamlined and highly effective solution both at the unit level and across the entire franchise.

A hugely underrated benefit of franchise technology consolidation is the ability to view and manage real-time business operations from a mobile app.

Think about it: hospitality managers need to be in their store as much as possible. A few hours spent in the back office means less time quality testing food, getting orders moving, and ensuring a great customer experience.

Harri allows franchisors and franchisees alike to communicate with team members, view or modify employee schedules, pull sales and labor reports, receive notes and alerts related to compliance, and much more, all from a mobile device. The next time managers need to pivot people operations in the middle of a hectic workday, they have the tools they need to source and reallocate resources on the fly without disrupting their current workflow.

And because all of this data is accessible from one single solution, operators are empowered to focus on improving their location’s bottom line — rather than tracking down old records and reports.

Compounded savings

Hospitality business owners know how expensive it is to implement, manage, and pay for systems throughout different locations. And when your tech stack is composed of multiple systems, it’s easy to lose track of fees and cost increases.

Consolidating all HCM processes into a singular platform creates compounded savings across all franchise locations and simplifies your books. 

$50 per month here, $30 per month there, $100 per month here, and so on, are consolidated into one bill that tends to be cheaper in the long run as franchises are empowered to handle hiring, labor tracking, compliance, and more from a unified system.

This is extremely beneficial when running a large franchise because general managers will be able to focus on driving unit-level performance, improving the guest experience, and training employees for their individual store while maintaining franchise consistency across the board.

Streamline franchise operations with HCM tech

Franchise operations will only get more complicated amidst growing consumer demand, new compliance requirements, and COVID-19 recovery. Brands that utilize HCM technology as a strategic partner to connect the dots between cross-functional operations across the entire franchise have a huge competitive advantage. 

Learn how Harri drives optimal business performance for leading hospitality franchises by streamlining key HCM processes into a singular yet highly effective platform so franchisors can focus on their most important resource — their people.