Client Voice: Finding the Right Recipe for Collaboration and High Profitability

The challenges come thick and fast in the restaurant business, even for established providers and firm family favorites. Across the sector, we see high employee turnover, fierce competition for talent, slender profit margins, and seemingly endless administrative tasks. Taken together, it’s a tough time to be in hospitality.

Here at New England Authentic Eats, we own and operate two iconic brands: Papa Gino’s and D’Angelo Grilled Sandwiches. To thrive in today’s market, implementing the right processes and technologies is essential—and that’s why we use Paylocity. The platform sits at the center of our everyday HR and payroll work, helping us to support our people, foster collaboration, and build a more robust future for the business.

How HR Software Supports Our Growing Restaurant Business

Save Time with Streamlined Workflows

For starters, Paylocity enables us to replace time-consuming manual work with faster, more efficient processes. Take onboarding, for example. As a growing business in an industry with relatively high turnover, we’re almost always hiring. In the past, we spent up to seven days filling in forms and manually entering data to onboard new hires. That delay gave our competitors an opportunity to lure away our talent—so we wanted to be able to get people on board much faster.

With Paylocity, we have digitized onboarding and registering new recruits on our payroll, eliminating the tedious paperwork and error-prone manual tasks. The whole process now takes no more than ten minutes.

That means we offer a more compelling proposition to our job applicants. They can start their first shift and get their first paycheck sooner, which gives us a crucial advantage in the highly competitive labor market. Plus, cutting the paperwork means our team leaders have more time available to help them find their feet.

Cutting Complexity with Integrated HR and Payroll Systems

We operate 167 franchisee and corporate restaurants, with more than 2,200 employees. Managing our workforce is never simple, especially when staffing needs change at short notice. But Paylocity makes our day-to-day work so much easier. It gives us a single platform for tracking employee schedules, time worked, and labor costs. It helps us manage payroll and communications, and even forecast future workforce needs.

We didn’t always have everything running so smoothly. Prior to Paylocity, we relied on disconnected systems, with an in-house payroll tool and email for sharing information. We even used physical mail to send out information about 401k plans and other important documents. Costs were high, and life was complex for managers and employees.

Switching to Paylocity has been a game-changer: we have one source for all HR and payroll data, and employees only have to log in to one system to track their attendance and access documents.

Minimizing Churn by Keeping Employees Engaged

Holding onto the best talent has always been a headache for hospitality businesses. To minimize the risk of turnover, we aim to foster a strong collaborative culture that keeps our employees engaged and ensures that they feel valued. Ultimately, we want them to buy into our wider organizational goals—that’s what fuels high productivity, improves talent retention rates, and ultimately helps to increase profitability.

Paylocity plays a key role here. We use the Community function as a social interaction hub, with team leaders regularly putting out announcements and news, while our employees are able to connect and chat with each other and set joint goals. And we use the Peer Recognition tool to recognize and celebrate their hard work and dedication—it’s an excellent way to give people a lift and boost morale.

We can see the positive impact that our approach is having. Employees are logging into Community every day and building strong relationships with their peers. The tools are especially useful for welcoming new hires and making sure they feel part of the team. And by running regular pulse surveys through Paylocity, we make sure we’re always open to employee feedback and suggestions.

Making Life Easy for Employees with 24/7 Access to Information

Of course, engagement isn’t built solely through proactive communications. It’s also important to make sure that employees can quickly and easily access all the tools and resources they need to work effectively and manage their career. With people working different shift patterns and scattered across multiple locations, it can be difficult to keep everyone in the loop. But with Paylocity, we offer them flexible, 24/7 access to key information via their cellphone.

For example, we use the Employee Self-Service and Document Library tools to provide a one-stop shop for our teams. They can view their paychecks and timesheets, request paid time off, download tax forms, update their personal information and contact details, and see opportunities for training and personal development. This makes things as simple and convenient as possible and helps to keep everyone engaged.

There are valuable operational benefits to the self-service model, too. During tax season from January to April, our HR and Payroll helpdesk used to receive upwards of 5,000 calls and emails from employees about W-2 forms. Now, employees simply log in to Paylocity to access their documents, saving us hundreds of hours each year.

All in all, our partnership with Paylocity brings huge value to our business. Even when the pressure is on, we have the agility to respond fast, overcome complex challenges, and build towards our objectives. With Paylocity, we have HR and Payroll fully covered, allowing us to concentrate on offering great service to our patrons.

Learn more about how Paylocity can help restaurant and hospitality businesses by checking out the eBook: 5 HR Challenges in the Restaurant & Hospitality Industry or take a look at New England Authentic Eats case study.