ZaLat Pizza opened its doorways in 2015 with the target of filling white area with high-quality, late-night takeout pizza within the Dallas-Fort Value space. The enterprise mannequin has confirmed to be a rousing success—by the top of 2022, ZaLat may have practically 30 areas between the Houston and Dallas metro areas. However the mannequin additionally brings with it varied challenges. Specifically, handmade pizzas cooked late into the night time require a well-trained workforce that may constantly execute and meet the ZaLat model requirements.
“Making 1000’s of handmade pizzas takes an unimaginable quantity of coaching,” Nguyen says. “And never simply coaching, but it surely requires buy-in from our workforce. We’re not simply throwing pizzas on a conveyor belt—in case you’re hand-cooking and baking your pies, the chance of burning or underbaking is trendenmous. To be best-in-class on this area requires plenty of love and care.”
In that approach, ZaLat Pizza is hardly distinctive within the quick-service area—it faces lots of the identical recruitment, retention, and coaching challenges that each one manufacturers do. As Nguyen and his workforce maintain opening shops and increasing, they’ve discovered that the tradition they construct is simply rising in significance.
The place ZaLat Pizza finds itself forward of the sport, nevertheless, is in its distinctive capability to create a tradition that earns worker buy-in. It begins from the highest down: few, if any, restaurant trade CEOs have taken steps that Nguyen has to create a dynamic firm tradition. Worker perks embody inventory choices within the model, and a tattoo artist on retention for workers who would really like some ink after a yr on the job. ZaLat Pizza additionally awards coloured bracelets for workers to put on that point out how lengthy they’ve been with the corporate, impressed by the belts earned by college students of Taekwondo and Karate.
However, in line with Nguyen, considered one of his model’s greatest retention instruments is its coaching platform: Opus, a mobile-first coaching platform constructed to interact the trendy employee. Opus is centered on the concept staff who stand on their toes all day want to be educated through a mix of cell studying and on-the-job expertise coaching. The platform helps operators construct participating content material that effectively trains deskless staff on what they should know with a view to get ramped up rapidly. Administration can simply create multimedia classes in lower than 10 minutes and routinely assign them to workers, brandwide, whereas monitoring how successfully every worker can execute on procedures.
“Basically, in case you’re going to have a fast-casual operation with the wants for a proficient workforce the way in which we do, a studying administration system that they discover participating could be very, essential,” Nguyen says. “You’ll be able to’t simply have previous videotapes coaching McDonald’s staff. It’s 2022—there are instruments it’s essential put into place to ensure you can convey your workforce on top of things as rapidly as potential. For us, they’ve to grasp the mission we now have, and why we want extra from them than a typical model would.”
However Opus’s usefulness to Nguyen and his operations workforce shouldn’t be restricted to studying methods to execute recipes, or detailing, step-by-step, methods to correctly ring in an order. Nguyen additionally makes use of it to clarify issues like why ZaLat gives workforce members inventory choices, or why the corporate retains a tattoo artist on retainer. He finds these micro classes important to his model’s mission of making an inclusive, motivating surroundings that workers wish to be part of.
“For those who work a typical restaurant job, the expectation is that you simply present up and also you’re informed methods to make the meals and what goes the place,” Nguyen says. “I believe what the previous couple of years have taught us is that most individuals don’t discover that to be a satisfying life by itself. For us, it’s essential that our workforce members know that we’re completely different.
“We don’t view our workers as a obligatory evil,” Nguyen continues. “They’re probably the most essential a part of the enterprise, as a result of the care and a spotlight to element they put into our meals is what we’re promoting. So we use Opus to clarify what inventory choices are, and why they deserve them. It’s a little bit complicated to show, however we want them to know that we care about them and are really prepared to put money into them.”
For extra on Opus’s capability to coach and retain workers, go to the Opus web site.
