The Frontline Engagement Gap: New Data From 50,000+ Workers on What Separates Retention Leaders From the Churn Cycle

Hello, and welcome everyone to today's program with Achieve Engagement. My name is Zech Dahms, president at Achieve Engagement. As your community leader, I'm grateful that you're taking some time out of your busy schedules to sharpen your craft, level up your impact, learn new practices and strategies that you can take back to whatever context that might be at your organization, maybe your team, maybe a company that you're serving and working with, but coming and growing and developing yourself means the world. So thank you so much for doing that with us today. We got an incredible program that's full of research, full of some practices from the field, and we're going to unpack some of these topics together. And I already love some of the activity happening in the chat right now. If you haven't already, let us know where you're calling in from. I love some of the social learning aspects of these programs. Yes, we get a ton of opportunities to learn from experts in the field who are researching this, who are doing this within their own roles, but there's also a ton of value in the peer-to-peer learning piece, in the chat, and with each other as a network. So I encourage you to really tap into that today. So as we're going through this program, I really encourage you to, one, share your own insights, your own strategies, things that you've been doing within your own role or team or whatever context that might be. And then on the flip side, you have access to some incredible experts who are doing this with tons of different companies as well as in-house at their own organization. This is a great opportunity to get some expert insight and coaching and strategy. So if there's something specific that you're dealing with that you would love some perspective on that could help move the needle or lead to some type of breakthrough, I encourage you to ask that today. Put that in the chat, put it in the Q&A. They're going to be working that into the discussion as they go, and you can get some real personalized coaching on what you're dealing with right now. So I encourage you to do that, but I do want to just take a look in the chat and just see what we got working out. Who have we got in the room? Keisha, we got you in Orlando. Huntsville, Alabama, Ben, welcome in here. Central Nebraska, Connie, welcome in here. Dave, my neighbor in Denver. I'm in Arvada right now. We're also joined by Jeremy today, which I'll introduce in a second. He's in Denver with us. Let's see. Ontario's in the house. Houston. Yeah, see what I was saying? Evergreen. I'll be in Evergreen this Saturday, so I hope to see you down there. Wisconsin, my home state. Good to see you in here. Charleston. This is awesome. I love the footprint, the spread that we have going on. Okay, the next thing I would love to see in the chat before we get into the content, I would just love to do a little bit of a pulse check with you all. And I see everything coming in. Yeah, Carolyn. Hey, Wisconsin. This is awesome. So today is all about frontline engagement, and they're going to share some research, some tactics, some insights that they've been seeing in frontline engagement, as well as strategies that we can do to start making an impact in this space. But I'd be curious for all of you, what does frontline engagement score for you right now? One, if you do have a frontline workforce and you do engagement assessments and insights and surveys and things like that, I'm just curious, where are you right now? What is your engagement score? And if you don't measure that yet, I'd be curious, what do you think it is? Do you think you're at a 70? Are you at 88? What engagement levels are you coming in with today? I would just be curious. I just want to get a pulse. And if it's not good, that's not a bad thing. You're here to learn, you're here to expose yourselves on how to move the needle forward, but I would love to hear and just see in the chat right now, what engagement levels are you at right now? If you had to measure it, if you had to assume and think of what type of number you're coming in at for your organization, for your team, where are you today? So I see a 73%. Yeah, Karen, around GoHappy's benchmark. Awesome. Chris, engagement was over 90% when they left. Six months later, plummeted 40. Geez, I'd be curious of what led to that. Sounds like part of you leaving, maybe. 75%, don't measure it, 79, 82 experience, 86 last year. Okay, 35 and 95. 95% of the company works from home. Okay. We want measurement. I think this is going to be a really important topic, and I think about the trends within AI and so forth, so much of middle management, some of the management pieces is where AI, I feel like, is being targeted. So this means to me, frontline employees and talent is going to continuously be more and more important. So the engagement, the performance, and the strategy around that, I think has to be a critical strategic initiative for you all. So that being said, let's get into some of the content, some of the experience, the learning today. We're very lucky to have these three leaders with us, and also want to give a shout-out to GoHappy. Let's give some love and appreciation for GoHappy for doing this program with us, and also leading both the research and the enablement and the strategy for so many organizations out there. So if you're not aware of them, make sure to check them out. You're going to learn a little bit how they're supporting companies today, but also some of the data behind the research that they found from 50,000 workers in this space. So let's give a welcome to Sean Boyer, founder and CEO at GoHappy, Ben Eubanks, Chief Research Officer at Lighthouse Research and Advisory, and then my Denver friend, Jeremy Edmonds, EVP, People and Culture at Snooze. So I'm going to stop sharing. Let's welcome these individuals. Hey, fellas. Welcome to the network. Appreciate you being here with us, taking time out of your schedules, and really excited to learn from you all. So that being said, I'm going to go on mute, and I'm going to turn my camera off, and I'm going to sit back and take some notes. And, Ben, yeah, I'll pass it over to you to kick us off All right. Awesome. Thank you, Zach. Appreciate it. And hey to everybody out there in the community, saw some friendly names in there and some people who are future friends in the chat already. So we are glad to be here with all of you. Looking forward to sharing some stories, some data. Jeremy has an incredible story to share about some of the stuff they're doing at Snooze, so we're going to have a blast today. So I know Sean is getting the slides up for us. Really quickly, about me, I started my career as an HR leader, and now am a researcher that tries to use data to help all of you serve your people better. That's what I spend my day doing. So as we're going through some of the data today, you'll understand why when I told the GoHappy team about this, I was all in, because this is a chance to use the data that they have, the data that we have at Lighthouse to try to help all of you make a better decision tomorrow than you made yesterday. Just be a little more informed. And as we're going through today, it's my hope you get a bunch of practical takeaways, good ideas, not just some cool data points because they're there, but some good things you can go and do and help to enable throughout your business. And I said in the chat a minute ago, taking that engagement from good to great. That's what I think the opportunity is here today. So Sean, why don't you do your quick intro? Yeah. Well, Ben, thank you for being part of this. And obviously, Jeremy, thank you for being part of this. Zach, thanks for hosting. And yeah, did see a lot of familiar faces. Ben and I actually met, Ben, what was it? 15 plus years ago, I guess. Oh, yes. Maybe longer than that. I don't know. Anyway, so it's super fun to be able to do this. So yeah, thank you to everybody for being on this. So again, Sean Boyer, founder and CEO here at GoHappy, and did see a lot of familiar names coming across on the chat. Some of them I did not know, so hope we have the chance to meet you at some point. So yeah, excited to dig in. Turn it over to you, Jeremy. Yeah. Thanks, Sean, and thanks Ben and Zach for having me here. Jeremy Edmonds, I'm the Executive Vice President of People and Culture at Snooze. I'm loving all the Snooze love I'm seeing. And Sue's so thankful that you ate at Snooze for brunch today. Thanks for the incredible picture you sent me earlier on that. I've been in the frontline worker space now for around 25 years, and I'm incredibly passionate about what we do in this space, how we engage people in this space, and the secret to it is leadership and how do you really ensure that those leaders have the skills, the tools, the programs to inspire and motivate those people. Oh my goodness. Well, I can't wait to get into your story in a little bit and hear some more about that, what that looks like. And I know you have some cool stuff to talk about as far as your perspective on mission and vision and values and weaving that into all they're doing. So looking forward to getting into that. So we've teased the data for you a little bit. So Sean's driving. If you want to flip over here, we'll go ahead and get started with some of the data points and really give people an idea of what we're going to cover. So we're going to spend the first part of today's conversation, Sean and I going back and forth a little bit, sharing. We're going to bring Jeremy in to share some of his story, talking about some of this research we've done. We're going to give you some data points. We're going to help you see where you are. We already got a pulse from Zach a minute ago on where everyone stands, but you'll see how you stack up. We'll give you some specifics on where those numbers come from, how they're moving and changing, but then we're going to transition to a conversation. I'm going to be asking some questions of these two gentlemen around some of the things they're seeing. Sean has this incredible position to be able to see all these different organizations using GoHappy's platform to try to do this well, and he recently had a chance to visit with many of them in person. So he's got some great stories from that, and then Jeremy's going to be able to tell his story, both from his experience broadly, but also what they're doing at Snooze right now. So that's the plan today and the conversation, and we'll wrap up with some takeaways before we get to the end today so you have some good homework to go and do. Wouldn't be a good session without leaving you with some things to go take care of. Now, here's the gist of this. So the GoHappy team has a platform. They enable employers to survey their people and understand what's going on with them, how their engagement's going, and they take those data points and pull them together and show those off at a high level. Well, they knocked on my door and said, "Hey, would you want to come look at basically the biggest data set out here around this?" And I was like, "Heck yes." So what this covers is the primary data. We have all these different responses from frontline workers about their engagement, how they feel about their leaders, and how they are authentic. Are they coaching them? All those sorts of things. We have the 2024 data from that same set of people to understand how that moved over time. We'll look at that. And then we actually did a piece of research on this just last year around the broader frontline workforce. So not GoHappy customers, just people in retail, hospitality, manufacturing, all those different spaces to understand what's happening with them, how do they feel about work, what are their challenges and opportunities, and there are some pretty wild things. So it was my job to try to compare these, match them up where we had the questions that matched, and then start sharing that. So on this next slide, you'll start to see what we found when we got into this. We actually looked at the numbers, and number one thing we see looking at those year-over-year comparisons, engagement is moving in a good direction. It's improving, it's increasing, which is a win overall. And in turn, because of that, turnover's falling. Turnover is getting lower, it's getting better, and so that's a win for organizations that are trying to take care of their people. That excites me. But one of the things that was really fun, because these two things were gathered the same year, but in different ways of different audiences, both frontline workers, what we did is we started comparing our questions to some of the things that the GoHappy team asked. They'd ask a question around coaching, we'd find a question around coaching, match them up. And what we found is, overall, the GoHappy companies in that data set were scoring much higher than the companies that were just the generic frontline workers out there that are just in the workforce. And there's a couple reasons for that you can make some guesses about. A company that's drawn to using those tools is going to be trying to improve that, trying to measure that. When you hear Jeremy's story in a minute, you'll know what I mean.So that's one of the things we see there, but there's a gap, right? And as we start getting one layer deeper, we all know engagement isn't just one thing. It's not just a single thing that changes. There's a lot of pieces of that. Same with turnover. It's not one thing, it's lots of pieces. So Sean, if you'll flip over to this next slide, I want to look at this with you and show you an example of this. So what you see, the gray here represents the data we collected from the broader workforce out there that are frontline workers. And then the other two numbers, the green and orange, are the GoHappy datasets. And you now start to see what I was saying, where we have this gap. We have this real visible difference in between what's happening within that dataset and what's happening with the broader marketplace. And so we'll pick something as simple as the coaching one. Excuse me, we have someone coming. Okay, here we go. Taking it back to COVID days. All right. We look at the coach one here, and the responses from the average frontline worker out there are half the scores of someone from 2025 that's using the GoHappy platform as an employee, and each of those things, that's the most pronounced difference, but you start to see those gaps emerge. And as we're going through in the next little bit, Sean's going to talk about some of the things that GoHappy customers are doing differently, some of the things that separate them, some of the practices they recommend around those leader actions, which are so, so important. And so this is our first sort of cut across this, and before I pass that baton over to Sean, I want to remind you, there's actually a report that we developed as part of this. It may be the longest report I've written in a year. There's so much data in there like this. So if you're one of those leaders that's responsible for this at your company, and you're thinking about how to do this well, you can go into there and you can see, okay, we're in this industry, and it will show you those breakdowns, will show you where you compare to the broader benchmark, and what things you can do to actually improve that. So my goal with that was to really give people some things they can figure out where we are, but also where we're going and how to get there. So Sean, I'm going to pass it to you to continue on with some of the other data. Yeah. Great, and thank you again, Ben. It's been super helpful to just be in partnership with you on this. And so, again, to Ben's point, you would expect these, well, I would think most people at least would expect that the measurements would be better for companies with which we're working, because they do have this intentional focus on their culture. Obviously, they've partnered with somebody who's in the frontline employee engagement space. But I think the underlying thing here to me is that we would hear so often from people, because similarly to Jeremy, we've kind of been in this frontline HR space for the last 26 years, and you so oftentimes will hear from people, "We have frontline employees. Yes, we have high turnover. That's just to be expected." Right? It just comes with the territory of employing frontline workers. Well, yes, there is going to be higher turnover typically than what you're going to see with your desk workforce. However, it is controllable, and I think what this shows is that with this intentional focus on your engagement levels with your frontline people, with the right frameworks in place, and then with the right tooling in place, you really can make a meaningful difference within your organization. So on a year-over-year basis and relative to whoever your peer set is, which obviously allows you to win on a competitive front. So, a couple of things that I'll mention here. One is that measurements across all the dimensions, I know Ben just showed you a handful there, on all 12 of the dimensions that we measure, every single one of them improved on a year-over-year basis. So again, these are organizations that have been working with us for a while. They're employing a framework in order to be able to try to drive that engagement level up and drive that turnover rate down. And across the board on all 12 dimensions, there was an improvement. A couple of notable ones on leaders showing up in an authentic way to their teammates. That was up 13.2 percentage points on a year-over-year basis. And then similarly, on the employee experience side, which is very closely driving and mirroring the engagement side, that's up 9.3 percentage points on a year-over-year basis. And we all know that, okay, there is this linkage between engagement and turnover, but it's always nice to see it play itself out in the actual data. And so when you look at this on a year-over-year basis, again, we saw what that engagement score did on a year-over-year basis in terms of going up about eight and a half percentage points. You see the turnover rate going down proportionately almost on a one-to-one basis at around 10 percentage points. So dropping from just under 100% turnover down to just under 90% turnover on a year-over-year basis. And so again, these organizations realize that there is a significant ROI from focusing on these engagement scores and driving down that turnover rate. And again, it's playing itself out here in the numbers. And so I don't know, Jeremy, this may be a good time for you to talk a little bit about the turnover rate there at Snooze, because you guys are beating even the peer set that falls into what we refer to as our happiest frontline worker category. So in order to fall into that, you have to have had an engagement score of north of 75%. Snooze is north of that, and their turnover rate is south of what we're seeing here in the benchmark, even for the happiest frontline workers, which is 80%. So again, almost a 20 percentage point delta on a year-over-year basis. So, Jeremy, with that, turn it over to you, buddy. Yeah. Thanks, Sean. You're hitting on something that I think is incredibly important, and we early on recognized the connection between higher engagement and lower turnover. And so we've spent our time Trying to understand and analyze within our engagement data, what are the true factors that are driving turnover down? And interestingly enough, as we dug deeper and deeper and deeper into the data, a trend started to come out in that, and the trend was rooted in this idea that the bigger the impact that we can have on the employee, the higher the engagement scores were in that restaurant. And where this came up is we were looking at two restaurants, one with a high engagement, one with a low engagement, and similar drivers behind it. But it was consistent across those lower-scoring restaurants that the managers that were more engaged with their team and focusing on developing them, focusing on connecting them to our mission, our vision, our values, our core beliefs, and the managers that genuinely and authentically cared for their people and demonstrated that through not just the programs we created, but through daily interaction with them, were driving those engagement scores up. In those restaurants where we had managers that were maybe following the process and the programs that we have, but not doing it in an authentic way, and not putting the effort and the meaning behind developing and growing their talent, we're seeing lower engagement scores. Love it. There's a quote that I just saw the other day that made so much sense and to your point just now, those moments that they're creating every single day make such a difference. And so small moments done consistently create extraordinary relationships over time. Right? And so, again, back to the frontline leader, and we'll talk a lot more about this in a minute, making such an incredible difference in whatever that employee experience is, and as a result of that, that employee's level of engagement. So- You know, Sean, the way we articulate that at Snooze is we say it only takes a moment to make a difference. And that's not only a mantra that we use for how we think about engaging our guests and creating experiences for them, but it's also the mantra we use internally to think about how you engage your team. Every single day, it only takes a moment to make a difference, and it can be as simple as saying to somebody, "Hey, what are you thinking? Where are you going? What's important to you in your career, in your life, and what you're doing today?" And just listening and then figuring out ways that you can continue to help them grow. We're in an industry that has natural turnover because 33% of our people are students. But what we teach our managers and what we talk to them about is that person is just as important, maybe not to your turnover number because they're driving it down, but when you can make a difference in their life and give them a skill that when they leave Snooze, they're going to go use somewhere, that makes all the difference. So it drives that engagement up, and for that year that they're with us, they're serving that guest, and they're showing up as their best self every day. Mm-hmm. Yep. Love it. And I think it was, again, as we look at the organizations who do this best within our universe, at least, again, they've got that engagement score of north of 75% with that average turnover rate being right around 80%, and you compare it. So these are organizations that are within the manufacturing vertical, restaurant vertical, retail, healthcare, transportation and logistics, hospitality, et cetera. Most of them typically hover north of 100% in their turnover rates, and so again, significantly south of that. And I think one of the things that all of them have in common is that they know how much of an ROI this generates to the organization. Obviously, in terms of turnover, which we'll cite a couple of different facts here, but two, in terms of increased productivity, decreases in absenteeism, decreases in just operational inefficiencies and so forth. And so anyway, any organization can run the math on this, right? If you're trying to make a compelling case internally as to why this matters so much, it's not just a soft thing, but it is very much a controllable expense. And in most cases, for the organizations that we serve, it is the largest controllable expense that they have on their P&L, right? Because of just the high volume of frontline workers that they have on their teams. But if you're a 5,000-employee company and you can decrease that turnover percentage by 10% year over year, that's a $2.3 million savings. Your 10,000-plus employees, just under five. So again, it's very meaningful. And so when we get back to, and this is something that Ben mentioned, something that Jeremy was just touching on, too, is it all comes back to the leader. Maybe not all, but so much of it comes back to that frontline leader. And so we look at four dimensions, what we refer to as four leader actions, that these leaders are carrying out that then have a direct impact on that employee's experience, that again, ultimately leads to their level of engagement. And so those four things that we are measuring are that leader showing up as an authentic person, authentic leader. How well are they appreciating their team? How well are they connecting with their team? And then how well are they coaching their team? And when you look at these organizations, and again, this is just go happy customers relative to the broader market. On the coaching side, 136% better than the market. Appreciation, what I want to come back to that in just a second, 95% better. Connect, 77% better. And then being authentic, 32% better. And so just a couple of, again, I think valuable tidbits there. Read kind of the smaller print. Workers who get regular feedback, 50% more likely to understand their job expectations, right? And when we see the lower scores showing up on people's engagement scores, it's that I don't know what's expected of me. I don't get feedback from my leader, right? These are showing up in the comments as people are filling out the engagement surveys. And so, that's something that just seems so simple, but having that maniacal focus on that as an organization that's being instilled within your frontline leadership can make such a difference. On the connection side, right, workers with communicative supervisors are 2.4 times more likely to feel supported, right? Again, it's one of those things that we all know when we think about the best leaders we've interacted with is people who are super communicative with us, right? Like, "Hey, JeremyNeed you to be doing this today, bud. Here's what we got on the radar today. We got this group of 30 people coming in for a Mother's Day event," or whatever it might be, right? But they're constantly communicating with you. They're constantly soliciting your feedback on things. And then that transparency, that authenticity, workers who feel their employer isn't transparent are nine times more likely to call their culture dysfunctional. Right? And so, again, just that need to be constantly talking about this and coaching your leaders on how to show up as authentic leaders is so critically important. And then this appreciation piece, I do want to build out a little bit more. And again, the ROI on this one is workers who feel appreciated regularly are nearly six times more likely to describe their culture as functional and supportive. Six X, right? And so, again, it's one of the most visible gaps that we see between the go happy cohort set versus the market at large, and it's also one of the fastest improving dimensions on our year-over-year basis, and it's because, again, so many of our employers, it is an intentional focus for them right now. It's like, "Hey, we have to be fantastic at this." We can't just be the generic, "Hey, great job for doing your job" type of an approach. It is, "Hey, Jeremy, in the moment, awesome job doing X. I saw that, man. That made a huge difference on them. I so appreciate it." "Hey, Ben, you know what? I saw you do XYZ great, but I did see where you missed an opportunity to do Y or Z." And so it is that just constant feedback. It's that constant- Rhythm ... communication around. Yeah. Of it, and again, it's just a cadence, right? And it allows you then to be able to give the more constructive feedback without it coming across as being just critical in nature. So Jeremy, jump in. I see you want to speak. Yeah. I love that you brought the feedback piece up. When we talk about feedback here, there's a couple of things that we zero in on. First, we tell every manager that it's a three-to-one ratio. Every single day, you should be giving to every one piece of redirecting feedback, three pieces of reinforcing feedback. And the language that we use with them around feedback is reinforcing. I'm going to reinforce the behaviors that are working well. So when I say, "Great job. The way you greeted that table was awesome. I love that you asked for allergies at that table," I'm reinforcing that behavior within you. And then for every three times you're doing that, you're giving one piece of redirecting feedback to somebody. Mm-hmm. And that ratio, when you teach a manager to think in that context, "Okay, I'm going to go give someone a redirecting piece of feedback, now I have to find three more reinforcing pieces of feedback to give in my day," you start to change that behavior, and you change those norms, and you change the way that manager is communicating within the restaurant. Mm-hmm. Can I throw something in there really quickly? Oh, yeah. Because for some managers, the first time you do that, Jeremy, it's probably like, that's going to be awkward, right? Like, yes. Oh. Absolutely. Expect it to feel weird. Okay, it's going to be, right? I used to say it's like a muscle that you're building. The first time you go to the gym, it hurts. It feels weird. You're like the only person who doesn't know what's going on around you. How does that machine even work? You feel out of place, but the more you do it, the rhythm, right? The cadence, you said, Sean. That comes around, but you have to build that comfortability with it. It doesn't just naturally pop up. No one's born giving great feedback to other people. They have to be trained to do that, and that's one of the things in the comments that Chris was talking about. He said we kept seeing this problem where people get promoted into manager jobs that were just individual contributors that did really good at their job, and they get put as a manager, and they fail because it's a very different skill set, because they haven't been taught those things. So wanted to throw that one in there because there's some good chat conversation going on that ties in with this. Yeah. Love it. Ben raised a really good point around feedback and the authenticity behind it. I oftentimes, when we're talking to managers about this, they say, "I don't want to be inauthentic." And what I usually combat them on is it's not about what you're feeling is maybe not authenticity, it's the nervousness to do it. At your core, I'm pretty sure you want to celebrate this person. You just don't have the language or the tool or the skill set to do it yet. So the authenticity, the tone and the feel of authenticity will come the more frequent that you do it. But at your core, you're doing it because you care. Yes. Love it. Jeremy, our good friend, Chester, one of the things he says is, "Relationships don't maintain themselves, neither do cultures." And I think it's just having- ... that culture of appreciation within the organization and, obviously, incredibly important that the frontline leaders are doing it. We launched a rewards and recognition tool last year, and one of the things that that does is allow anybody within the organization to be able to give other people shout-outs. And it's just so fun to see and then to hear from the team members who not only are receiving the appreciation and how much that means to them, but also that those team members who are giving that and how much that is meaningful to them, right? That they can now reward and recognize their teammates. And so again, it's one of those things that just having that intentional, to your point, Ben, that rhythm, that cadence of appreciation is so darn critical. So this is the last slide that we have teed up here before I wanted to turn it back over to Ben. And Jeremy, I did want you to chime in on this one, too. But this is the framework that the employers use on the platform, and each of them may have their own little deviations around this. But in essence, it is this rhythm again around asking for feedback from your team. It is then distilling the results and then sharing back with them what it is that you heard, right? So, the whole adage of you're better off not to have asked and not done anything with it, right, than to have... Well, you're better off to have not asked at all if you're not going to do anything with the feedback or share back what it is you heard. And we find that to be so true. It's that those best run organizations, when they're asking for feedback, they are immediately distilling the results from that. If it's going to take them three weeks, four weeks, five weeks, whatever it is, to be able to share it back with the team, they let the team know that, "Hey, we heard you. Thanks so much for participating in the surveys."We're collecting/distilling it all now. We're going to share back with you what it is that we heard and what we're going to do about it. So once you've done that, you're announcing those focus areas back to the team, and then it's all right, let's put that action plan into place. Right? And one of the things we see the best-run organizations doing is they don't try to boil the ocean with six, seven different initiatives based on what it is that they heard. They typically are taking two or three of those and saying, "All right, here are going to be our focus areas over the course of the year." And again, obviously, you're sharing that back with the team. And then what we see them doing is immediately prior to conducting that next survey, it is letting them know, "Hey, again, gang, here's what we heard back from you. Here is what we've done as a result of that feedback, and here are some of the early wins that we've seen." Just so that when you're asking them for the feedback again, they know that, okay, you listened to me the last time. Maybe you didn't actually do the one thing that I asked you to do, but at least I know from the broader teammate base you've listened to us, and you've taken that into account, and you've taken initiative on those things. We see that when people are doing that, it obviously drives up their participation rates year over year. We see in a lot of cases people's participation rates going up high single digits, low double digits on a year-over-year basis. And again, those engagement scores going up significantly when they're doing that. So again, those companies that fall within that happiest frontline employer category, those 17 companies that we surfaced earlier, they're all doing some variation of this. So Jeremy, I know you guys employ a framework similar to this, so maybe if you could just share a little bit about how you all do it. Yeah, absolutely. When we rolled out engagement surveys back in 2019, that first survey, I remember the results, looking at them, we had 40 some odd percent participation. And the feedback that we heard immediately was a lack of trust in the survey and a lack of trust in what we're going to do with the data that we receive. So a very apparent problem was posed to us, which is how do we ensure that people understand that we are listening to them, and we take it seriously? And I love this model, Sean. I wish we would've come up with ADAPT at the time. We didn't come up with such a cool acronym for it, but ultimately we did- That was Jason ... a very similar framework that we take the feedback. The key thing to us is ensuring that we can get the results quickly, and we can talk about them quickly. And it's one of the things, Sean, that I appreciated a ton about GoHappy, we're seeing our results live in action. So when that survey ends on day 14, because we run a two-week period, our data is right there with us, and we can immediately start to begin that messaging and ensure that leaders have access to the results and the tools that they need. What we found was ensuring from the very beginning that the buy-in from the manager was there, that they know that they're going to get the results quickly, and we're going to support them in ensuring that they can take action on it. And so early on, we would spend 80 hours just compiling all this information and giving each restaurant an individual sheet with a summary of their results. Luckily, GoHappy solved that for us, and now we do it in two minutes. You saved me a significant amount of time, and Finn, who's on here, I know appreciates you and your team for building that. But we found that the quicker we can get the results in the manager's hands with clear understanding of what the results mean, it allowed those managers to then quickly engage their teams. And the more we shorten that timeframe between result, action, and then follow-up, the better we saw the next year when we would roll the survey out, people wanting to be engaged, wanting to be a part of it. And there's been some great comments and conversation in here around authentic communication and the comms, and that's been our secret. We don't just stop after the survey's done. Every single month, we're continuing to bring in information from the survey and talk about it. And it typically starts with, when you took the survey in August, you said this was important. Now let's talk about it as a group. We set our one to two main company goals, but we're consistently bringing the data and the information that we receive from the survey into conversations year-round. Yeah. Well, and I feel like one of the things you all do, well you guys do so many things well, one of the things that you all do really well, too, is involving the managers in that process of encouraging the Snoozers to participate in the survey. Yeah. And hey, because a lot of times, the manager may be a little leery of what it is that people might say and view it as a potential negative thing. But again, in you all's case, it's like, "Hey, we want your feedback. I want your feedback. It's super helpful for me to be able to develop as a leader." And so, I think, again, Snooze and the others who do it so well, take a really active approach with their GMs, with their frontline leaders to make sure that they're communicative with their teammates, making sure they know, "Hey, this is really important to me. I want to get better as your leader." So... Yeah. Sean, you touched on two things there that I think is important. First off, we're doing this survey to serve that manager. We want to give them the tools and the data to support their teams and effectively lead and care and love every single person in that building with them. So engaging them through that lens, this isn't an HR function. This isn't a corporate function. This is a you function. We're giving you a tool that helps you out. And the language you use there, Sean, is really important. When that manager starts every shift with, "Your feedback matters to me. If you haven't taken the survey, would love to get you in there." And giving them data along the way to let them know their participation helps them engage their team in the most authentic and genuine way. Mm-hmm. Yep. Love it. I wanted to stand and applaud for that, Jeremy. Goodness. That was good. And so I want to come off that last thing you shared because I want to sort of take a counterpoint really quickly and ask for your input here. SoOne of the things that we see in our research around frontline workers is we ask them to tell us about their manager and how much they do care. And what we find is when they tell us, "Hey, listen, my manager is trying, they're just too busy," that person has the same likelihood to quit as the person that says, "My manager doesn't even care at all." So it's this weird thing where some managers are like, "Man, I'd love to do that, but I've got this other priority, it's pulling me another way." So how do you help managers move from that, "Hey, that's something I know is on my to-do list, but it's going to get pushed off till tomorrow or next week," they're just too busy. How do you help them transition from that to actually showing the care that you're talking about in this conversation so far? Yeah. There's a couple of things that we do. We established what we call our leadership principles, and two of the principles, the first one is teachers first and foremost. The number one role of every manager in our building is to be a teacher first and foremost. Because if you come in every day with the mindset that I am here to grow, develop, teach, and help you, that's creating just their natural ability to do that. Yes, you're running a restaurant, but your role is to teach, grow, and develop your people so that you can run a restaurant. And it's that shift in mindset of we have 1,000 things to do in the restaurant every day because of all the guests coming in and all the food we're preparing, but if you have your team delegated and put in all the right spots so that you can teach, develop, and grow them, then you will have the natural time and the ability to care. And then the second thing that we teach every single person from a leadership perspective is that you lead with love. And leading with love means leading the whole person, and you show up every day in the perspective that I lead you as a whole person, and that I care genuinely for you. And so if those two things are your primary role as a leader, then running the restaurant comes easy because you have all your right people in all the right spots. You've grown them. They have the skills to do the job, so now you have the actual time and the bandwidth to focus on caring about your people. I want to tell you something that you're going to completely be like, "Obviously," but for the audience's benefit, I'm going to share this. So one of the things that stands out to me in that research, because you said that care word, that love word, those don't usually come up when it comes to talking about our employees. I love it, though. I think it's incredible because it tells what kind of culture you have there, right? And people feel that, and that's why you see numbers that are better than benchmark on turnover and everything else. And so one of the things that stands out to me is we asked these frontline workers in this survey, again, all these are industries, just said, "Does your manager understand you?" Right? Do they get you? Sort of what you were getting at right there. And if they said no to that question, statistically, there's almost 0% chance of them saying that they support me after that. And so when I talk to leaders, I'm like, "Listen, my piece of advice is that manager can't know the shift they're working, the job title they have, their work duties, and that's it. Because the person's a whole lot more than that. We have to know what kind of things make them tick. We have to know, 'Hey, this thing's coming up. I'm going to save that for Sherry because that's going to make her smile so big when I get to let her do that thing for her,' right? Whatever it is." So knowing the people, what makes them tick, what makes them shut down, that's what really sets apart those great managers, and I love that you're just like, "You have to do those things first, or you can't do the rest of this." Right? It came up in the chat earlier. You can't do the appreciation stuff. It's going to feel mechanical if you don't first care, period. Yeah. We asked a question on our survey a few years ago because we always rotate in a couple unique questions, and we don't keep them consistent, but it's more just to kind of gauge things. And the question was, what does your manager do that shows you that they care? And it was just so interesting to me the responses that we got to that. Some things were as little as they say good morning to me every single morning and ask how I'm doing, which is like you're like, "Yeah, that's basic. You should be doing that." And then other things are they know the name of my three kids. They knew the name of my dog. When my dog died, they gave me flowers. There was another one that said that they know that every Tuesday night I go visit my mom, so they make sure I'm out of here in time so that I have the space to do it. And it's all these little things, but the story that was told was it's all these little things that you do that add up to show how much you actually genuinely care about someone. That's why it's hard to fake it because you can't do those things all the time. You've got to come from a place of care at the beginning. Oh. So, Sean, I want to ask you a question, if you don't mind. You have this, again, incredible data set. We've talked about it a couple of times. One of the things that I'm curious about after hearing some of the conversation today, let's say that we are able to follow Jeremy and Snooze's lead here. We're able to get our managers to say, "Okay, I've got time to do one thing." Based on what you're seeing within the companies using GoHabit, what is the one thing that manager needs to do, like that one skill to prioritize, that one interaction to prioritize? What's going to lead to the highest leverage activity, if that makes sense? What's the one thing they can do? Yeah. I would say, and then I want to come back to one of the things that you guys were just talking about, but I would say the coaching piece. And again, I think Jeremy just talked about it, that teacher mentality, that teacher first mentality, right, is that regular, consistent feedback to the people on their team. And again, that falls into the category of you're appreciating them when they're doing the things well and reinforcing that behavior, and then it is also giving them that redirecting, as Jeremy put it, that constructive piece of feedback to them, letting them know what they're doing well. It also comes in the form of, again, that understanding of where do they want to go. Are they a student? Are they just here for the summer? And that's fine, but you can still get an understanding of how this job might play into whatever it is that they may want to be able to go do later on. And so that coaching piece we see has the most direct correlation, or having the biggest impact on the experience, and then ultimately on the engagement levelsJust coming back to one of the things you guys were just talking about, that whole quote of, "People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care." And we have a customer, they've got about 7,000 employees in a convenience store business. And we were having a conversation with their senior VP of HR the other day, and she was talking about one of the things she does is she does bingo cards with her frontline leaders. And it's basically around how well do they know the people on their team. And so she'll do it for each of the different people on their team, and she was doing it with one of the managers who had lower engagement levels, higher turnover. And she was going through different things with him, and she was like, "Okay, this guy's been with you for four years now. What's his last name?" He's like, "I don't know." She's like, "Wait a second. This guy's been with you four years, right? You've got 20-some people on your team." "You don't know his last name? No wonder you have a higher turnover rate." So anyway, different tools that you can use to make sure that people are getting to know the people on their team and showing that level of care, and then ultimately being able to use that to be able to coach them and help them grow in whatever it is that they're ultimately wanting to be able to go do. So long-winded answer to the question. I think it's a great example. I love little tools like that that we can easily incorporate. That's not a 10-month cycle to get that implemented. That's a quick hour to put that together and get that out to people. So I love that example. One of the things I know in the chat, there's been a lot of support for people talking about the communication piece and connecting with people and using that as a tool for connecting with our frontline people. One of the things that I would add onto that is when I found a manager who was just rocking it, doing so well, I had to pause and elevate that story so all the other managers could see and hear about it and celebrate that story so they knew what we were expecting. Mm-hmm. Because a good friend of mine spent time at a big company. Her job was manager enablement, so helping managers be good managers was 100% of her job. And she said, "I'm convinced after doing this for thousands of managers over the last couple of decades, the biggest problem most companies have is they don't stop and just tell them, 'Here's what good looks like here.'" Mm-hmm. Because good at Snooze is different than good at Lighthouse. It's different than good at GoHappy. And any of you in the chat, it's different for your organization, your culture, your industry, your size, stage of business, everything affects that. And so taking the time to say, "Okay, if you're a good manager here, you're doing these things." And Jeremy- Mm-hmm ... you gave us some good examples a minute ago about that, right? Be a teacher. I love those examples of that because that shows that you've put that in practice. But you see that come out in how people behave, how they relate, how they connect, how they feel appreciated and respected in the workplace. Even in a job that is, they could work for some other restaurant, and they would treat them like the trash scraps are thrown in the garbage can. They're treating that employee the same way. And so I love that that comes around. That's an opportunity for us to use what we have, the position we have to lean into that and create some better outcomes. Hey, Ben, can I just say one thing on that? Of course. So I was just at a customer conference the week before last, City Barbeque. It's got about 80-some, what they refer to as joints. And they have the engagement scores and their turnover rates that show up on their GMs' scorecards. And then, people who have the highest scorecards are the ones who ultimately are in the President's Club, what they refer to. And they did such an awesome job of highlighting that every single person in the President's Club was somebody who had the highest, or they're all in the top quartile of the engagement scores. And so they were just saying, "Hey, look, gang, this matters." Again, yes, it is impacting turnover, but it's also impacting their overall performance level in terms of their sales volume and their EBITDA. And so anyway, I feel like to your point, highlighting those people and what it is that they're doing well, and then they have those people then act as mentors to other of the GMs who are struggling a little bit. So, again, just a little anecdotal point there. Love it. Today, I expected so much more data, and we're getting into all these practical and real stories into everything. I love that, so. Okay. We have time for one or two more bits before I have to do some takeaways for us and get us close to wrapping up. So I want to bring a question in. I teased it at the very beginning, and I've been saving it. And Jeremy, I'll start with you, but Shawn, definitely want to hear from you as well because you have this unique position as a founder and leader, too. So how do we help these frontline workers understand the connection between what they're doing and the real impact, right? How do we help them feel like it matters besides just I'm waiting a table, or I'm cooking a thing? It's easy to get tunnel vision and focus on that one thing that you're doing. How do we help them feel and understand the bigger impact of the work they're doing every single day? Yeah. At Snooze, the language that we use for it is storytelling. Every single person in our organization is a storyteller, and when you start someone on day number one, and you can tell them that Snooze was founded on this idea that a stack of pancakes can change the world. And our compass is Snoozers and guests and passion and best of the best and craveable and then sustainability and community. And you're telling this story, what you're doing from that first moment someone's walking in is you're bringing them in right away. And so all of our trainers are called storytellers for that reason, and then every single person continues to be a storyteller so that you can share those stories internally. I think there's so much to be said in that first 12 weeks of employment of bringing somebody in a way that invites them into the story and doesn't make it hard to come in, but you can be a part of something bigger. You can be a part of something great. And so we've spent a lot of time figuring out how do you connect every single person to our mission, to our vision, to our values, and when there's a disconnection there, as a leader, what skills and tools do you need to help-... that person out. Sometimes that disconnection is because they don't believe in what we believe, and that's fine. You can go to any other restaurant and find maybe what you need. And so you sometimes have to have the hard conversation too, to say, "If you're not going to come in every day and greet our guests in a way that's authentic and genuine, and show up as your best of the best, and if you're not going to believe in giving back to the community and sustainability, that's okay. But that's what we believe in, so we're going to hold you accountable to it." So there's the balance between accountability and storytelling that I think is important in executing what you asked within that question. I like that it's not just about the soft stuff, but we're going to hold you to this. Yeah. This is not just a vision. This is real life, every day, practical, from here's what we believe at a values perspective, to what it means for your job. The behavior is you show up and you smile at that person, and you say something before they have to say something to you. Right? Whatever- Mm-hmm ... your exact script is for it, but having that built into how they interact with people, I love it. Sean, anything you'd add there around the companies that you see that are doing really well as GoHighLevel customers that seem to have a good job of, do a good job of connecting people to that bigger mission, purpose, impact of the work they're doing? Yeah. I think it's more of just a build on what Jeremy just said. Every organization, or at least all the well-run ones, they have their mission vision values. But I think the really well-run ones, they are constantly bringing back that mission statement in front of people and giving them examples of how they are living it out. And so the ones we see are when people are sharing those stories. Again, we see them digitally, obviously, but it's being done in person as well, and sharing, "Hey, again, Ben, thank you so much for doing X, Y, Z." And it's there, a picture of Ben and whoever the guest was, and it's the impact that you had on that person. But they're tying it back to the mission statement, or they're tying it to one of the values of the organization, saying, "Hey, Ben, thanks so much for..." Let's say one of your values was being accountable. And so it's like, "Hey, thank you so much for being accountable and demonstrating it in the following way." And so I think they're just constantly bringing that back up in authentic ways, and basically shouting out people for when they're helping to live that mission out, or for when they're living out the values of the organization. When I was at Chuck E. Cheese- We call those our legends. That they were doing a core value so well that I told that story everywhere I went because it just exemplified that so well. Mm-hmm. Jeremy, do you have something else to add? You touched on something there, Sean, that I think is important. When you are a mission, vision, and values-led organization, the question that I challenge my leaders with all the time is if you can't think of this action through the lens of a value, then what is that action? If that action isn't in support of our values, then why are you doing it? And when you put people in that lens, they then can begin to understand, like, "Oh, maybe I shouldn't spend time here," or, "Maybe something's off." Because we really do need to do it through the lens of who we are and what we represent and believe in. Wow. That's so good. All right. We're getting close to our end here. I want to ask you all both a rapid-fire question if you're okay with it. Same question for each of you, just to save us time. But we talked about all the good things, recommendations, best practices, competitive things, creative ideas. This has been so good. I'm taking notes myself because this is so good. What is one thing that you have seen, one mistake that people usually make when they're trying to improve frontline engagement that does not work? Whether it's a previous experience or something else, we tried this, it didn't work. Jeremy, you'll start us off, one minute or less, what's a mistake people make here? I would say that the number one mistake that I see in managers who are trying to create engagement is to force it upon versus bringing people with. If they come in and say, "You must, you must, you must. This is how," you get immediate resistance. But if you come in and say, "Collectively as a team, how do we improve this? Collectively, how are we going to approach this?" And take people on the journey, you'll see quicker and more immediate change. Hmm. I like it. Okay. Sean? Well, since Sandy just said the one I was going to say You can give him lots of credit. Which is just asking for feedback and not doing anything with it. I would say, kind of in that same vein, but it's all in the spirit of trying to do good by the organization. It's trying to bite off too many things. So you get the feedback- Mm ... and then it's like, okay, we got to go tackle the following seven things, and then you just don't have the bandwidth to be able to do them. And you've told people you're going to do them, and then you don't. And so I would just say, man, start off smaller. Identify two, three things, go get some quick early wins with that, and share them back. So I would say, yes, it's not doing anything with the feedback, but second thing would then be trying to do too many things. And again, good intention- Yeah ... but it just falls flat. All right. Sean, do you have the slides handy? You popped that last one up- Yeah. I do ... real quick anyways, because I'll give some takeaways too really quickly before we wrap this up, everybody. I know Zach's dropping the codes in the chat there for everybody. So a couple things really quickly that I wanted to touch on here that, to me, are opportunities for us. We've talked about this a lot, but those frontline leaders are the tip of the spear. They are the make or break point for us to be able to get all this stuff done, because any company can decide big things and good things up here, but if your leaders aren't supporting it, then it's going to fall apart and fall flat. So we have to make sure we're supporting, enabling them, and that came up several times in the conversation today. Number two here, what we see in the data is that feedback is less about the frequency. It's not like 2.3 pieces of feedback a week is going to win. It's not that easy. What we see instead is that workers tell us, "Hey, if I want it on a certain frequency, and I get it there, I'm much more likely to be happy." So for managers, it reinforces that you got to know your people. If I am talking to Jeremy eight times a day, and he's like, "I just want to work. Leave me alone," okay, maybe I need to do it every two or three days and give him a quick hit on those things to, what was it, Jeremy? Reinforcement and- Redirecting Redirecting, yes. I love that bit there. So do it on what fits that person. Number three, transparency. Transparency can be as simple as, "Hey, you want to win here as an employee? Here's what you have to do." And spell it out in actual behaviors very clearly. That level of transparency is all that's needed. You don't have to tell them everything that's going on. You don't have to share all these crazy things. They just need to know what it takes to win, because that matters most to their job. And most people want to win. They don't show up to work trying to figure out, how do I do the least? They want to be good at their jobs, and we can enable that by telling them what we expect. Number four here, measure, acknowledge, act. Sean touched on that one. I know that Sandy called that one out. Do what you say you're going to do. If you're going to ask, you better be ready to do something. And then one more I'll touch on, that frontline reality number five here is, when we think about flexibility as people that do the work of HR and people and talent, we sometimes think about where I work. There's not a frontline worker out there that's... No one's making pancakes from their couch. Right, Jeremy? That's not happening. So they're on site. When we survey frontline workers, they tell us flexibility means when I work, so a little bit of flexibility in the schedule matters a lot. And the second one is autonomy. Do I have a little bit of flexibility in my day-to-day so that I can do it? You tell me what I'm responsible for, but let me do the how. Let me add my own flavor, my own spice into it when I can, so that I'm approaching it the way that makes me most comfortable and allows me to be my best self in that. It's got to align with the policies and all the other things, but that person's personal flair there matters. You see these really cool stories about some grocery bagger who dances in the grocery store, and- ... everybody's not having to do that. I'm never going to do that. They would run out of the grocery store if I danced. But that person, that's who they are, and they're showing up, and the customers like it and appreciate it. And if they don't, they'll go to the next aisle over. It's okay. So let people have some flexibility and autonomy in their work. That matters so much to them. And then we have one last slide, I think, to wrap us up. Sean, did you want to say anything else before we wrap today? What gets measured gets managed. So I know that's inherent throughout, in terms of looking at the data and stuff. But if you're not measuring those different important components, the encouragement would be to do that, just so that you can get better at it. And last thing I'd also say is thank you a ton, Ben, for your partnership in this. It's been fantastic. Appreciate it very much. Jeremy, as always, thank you, thank you for being such a superstar, you and Finn and the whole Snooz team, and kind of being the gold standard. And Zach, thank you again for hosting. And thank you all for spending your time with us today. Ben, back to you. Anything? Jeremy, anything? I know we're right at time. Yeah, we're right at time. Just really quickly- Okay, thank you ... thanks you all for joining us. Such an incredible opportunity to share with you today, and we appreciate all of you for the impact you're having on your people. You're showing up today to get sharp. Take the things you've learned today, go put them into practice, put them into action. That's how you can say thank you to us for sharing with you. And stay tuned. We'll be sharing the report out with everybody after the session is over with. You can get that. But thank you for the impact you're having on your people. That's going to help them be and do their best work for all of your customers. Appreciate it. Thanks, everybody. Thank you, all.