Whether you operate a single retail location or a chain of stores, your retail employees are your best asset. They are the ones who interact with your customers daily and can create a positive or negative association with your brand. 

But, with a 69% employee turnover rate in retail — 12% higher than the U.S. national average — it can feel like most of your time and resources are spent on hiring and training new staff rather than nurturing existing employees to be your best brand ambassadors. 

With an approximate price tag of $3400 to replace one employee, a retention strategy should definitely be on your radar.

Deciding to place a beloved family member in a senior care facility is challenging. It's a decision no family member wants to make, but they trust you and your staff to offer them the best care possible when they do.

However, if employee communication in your long-term care facility falls short, it can be a chaotic and frustrating experience for your senior care staff, residents, and their families. This can lead to families moving their loved ones to a different facility and employees leaving their roles to find work elsewhere — and in a worker shortage, it's unlikely you can spare staff right now.

Effective communication is the foundation for any successful relationship, and your assisted living facility is no different.

As a restaurant owner or manager, you know how quickly a tiny setback can spiral into full-blown bedlam. 

Restaurant workers are still quitting their jobs at an alarming rate. According to economists, the quit rate in hospitality and food service is nearly double that of the national average coming in at 6% vs 3%.

At the start of the pandemic, organizations scrambled to get online, set up curbside shopping, and restructure how to get work done and stay in business. It was like everyone was in fight or flight mode.

Those who fought (mostly) survived – and this fight to stay alive, forced companies to find new ways to do business. 

Many of these changes ended up being for the better. Namely, how the world views frontline employees. Before the pandemic, frontline workers were often considered expendable and easily replaced. But now, businesses know better. 

There’s nothing like a global pandemic to highlight poor employee communication. Especially in industries where workers need to physically show up for work.

Frontline and hourly workers make up 80% of our global workforce, and for industries like restaurant, retail, and manufacturing, they represent the largest percentage of the workforce. 

Communicating effectively with a large team of desk-less workers has its challenges. But the pandemic did an excellent job of highlighting just how critical frontline workers are to a company's success. And the mass job walkouts have taught us that frontline employees are no longer interested in being treated like second-class workers. 

The work world has experienced drastic changes over the last few years. The pandemic has influenced how businesses operate, from hybrid schedules to company policies, practices, and procedures. 

Every industry has its own unique challenges in communicating with its various constituents - prospects, customers and their employees.  

Senior living communities are certainly no different.  And, their communication challenges are unique and heightened in two ways:

1. Like most industries that have a large number of frontline employees who don’t have company issued email, they struggle with how to effectively communicate with those employees; and
2. they have an added layer of complexity because they need to communicate (in real time in a lot of instances) with their “customers”, who in a lot of cases are both their residents AND the family members of those residents, and they are not tied to a desk/email during the day.

To say that we have enjoyed working with these companies is an understatement - we have LOVED working with them and seeing all of the different ways in which they’re using the goHappy platform to solve for those challenges.  Below are a few examples of those just in case it can be helpful to anyone else out there who has similar challenges - we hope it can get your wheels turning!  In all of these instances, they are using goHappy to send text messages directly through our software to their frontline employees, residents and family members.

Seasonal hiring is more competitive than ever before as companies across the country look for innovative ways to staff up ahead of the holiday shopping season.