At Beekeeper, we’ve worked with many frontline organizations to help solve the disconnect between management and frontline workers.
Watch the full recap of our webinar with MakeReady here
We’ve also seen the challenges frontline organizations face during this process and the steps they take to solve them. We recently had the chance to talk with MakeReady, a hospitality organization with multiple hotels across the U.S., to get their insight into how they implemented Beekeeper to address the disconnect in their company.
Our speakers included:
- Mikia Brown, Corporate Director of People & Culture, Makeready
- Dan Waite, Senior Vice President of People & Culture, Makeready
- Payal Kumar, Customer Success Manager, Beekeeper
- Andrada Paraschiv, VP of Hospitality, Beekeeper
In this session, we covered:
- The cost of frontline disconnect
- How to address frontline disconnect
- Top employee engagement tactics
- Tackling change management
Let’s recap the discussion:
The Cost of Frontline Disconnect
Some of the challenges frontline organizations face around employee engagement include:
- Unclear expectations and insufficient enablement
- Insufficient recognition for a job well done
- Reduced quality guest experience due to lack of proper training and recognition
These employee engagement challenges have created a gap between the needs of the business and the ability to provide solutions for the hourly employees to do their best work.
Andrada Paraschiv, Beekeeper
Andrada describes what we call Frontline Disconnect: the gap between what frontline workers need and what management thinks is important.
Frontline disconnect costs organizations in many ways, including:
- Lost revenue
- Unhappy customers
- Higher safety incidents
- Diminishing quality and reputation
- Missed targets
Addressing Frontline Disconnect With Makeready
Makeready, a growing hospitality organization with hotels spread across the U.S., was faced with addressing frontline disconnect as their number of hotels and staff grew.
Before working with Beekeeper, Makeready was reaching its employees with a quarterly newsletter, which didn’t allow teams to engage with management on a regular basis. In addition, operational updates that required immediate attention were hard to communicate in a timely and effective way.
With Beekeeper, Makeready was able to establish two-way communication and keep its employees informed and connected. Not only did real-time communication improve the efficiency of daily operations, but there were other ways that both teams and management benefited from the mobile platform:
There’s so many amazing experiences that our team members have that often we don’t know about. Someone has a great stay or a great interaction with their room attendant, and they write a note or give them a gratuity, a lot of times leadership doesn’t know about that. Beekeeper allows employees to get a picture of that thank you note and share it with the team.
Dan Waite, Senior Vice President of People & Culture, MakeReady
Another crucial way that Makeready used Beekeeper to gain more insight into which processes could be improved by the platform happened at Guild, the company’s annual conference.
Using Beekeeper’s Surveys feature, Makeready created a Guild Survey that engaged with leaders across different locations about their operational challenges.
This was really important at this point in their journey because in order to drive further usage and keep team members interested, it is crucial to take the guessing out of the game and learn from the front line to understand their challenges and provide a tailored solution.
Payal Kumar, Customer Success Manager, Beekeeper
Change Management for Building a Truly Engaged Workforce
The three main takeaways that emerged from the discussion about effective change management were:
- Let employees see the value in new technology, which makes it much more likely they’ll participate in it
- Create consistent content that’s informative and engages with specific employees/teams
- Understand that change management takes time
Beekeeper’s Payal Kumar Frontline lead the disconnect has to be tackled in phases
- Onboarding: Mikia and Dan educated team and leaders about Beekeeper
- Engage: Key stakeholders continued to post exciting new content and engaged with employees through a channel on Beekeeper to gather feedback and encourage peer-to-peer recognition
- Operate: Additional stakeholders enhanced their current processes (like departmental checklists, schedule coordination, and digitized incident reports) with Beekeeper
- Transform: Challenges with frontline disconnect will be minimized to improve company performance
