Building a Positive Workplace Culture in QSRs: The Key to Reducing Turnover

By Kris Roberson on October 21, 2024

Working in a Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) is a fast-paced and high-stress position. Employees juggle long lines, irate customers, and often cover for absent coworkers, all while feeling unsupported. With a staggering 140% turnover rate, it’s clear many feel overworked and undervalued. 

The solution isn’t just better pay–it’s building a positive, supportive workplace culture and cultivating the leadership to sustain it. When employees feel appreciated and engaged, they stay longer and work harder. For QSRs to retain talent and thrive, creating a strong team-oriented culture is key, but doing so can be overwhelming. In this post, we’ll walk you through the core elements and steps you can take to rebuild your QSR culture and retain quality staff.

Blueprints of Positive Culture

Positive workplace culture pivots around the cornerstones of safety, inclusivity, communication, training, and appreciation. You have to think about how these tenets demonstrate your value of quality and people over pure quantity and profits.

Safety: Prioritize a safe work environment by actively preventing physical, verbal, and sexual abuse or harassment.

Inclusivity: Cultivate a diverse workplace to benefit from a range of talent and perspectives.

Communication: Establish timely, transparent communication, heed employee concerns promptly, avoid cliques and an ‘us versus them’ attitude.

Training: Model not only tasks but also workplace culture expectations and forge strong relationships between coworkers and between managers and employees.

Appreciation: Recognize employees openly and consistently to make your QSR culture attractive.

5 Steps for Building Positive QSR Workplace Culture

Building a workplace culture that supports and values employees leads to higher retention and long-term success. Investing in your team directly boosts your bottom line, but how do you put this into practice? Here are five actionable steps to enhance your QSR culture:

  1. Offer flexible scheduling: Negotiate scheduling with employees rather than just assigning shifts blindly. Scheduling that works with employee needs like childcare and appointments shows that you value their time and respect their responsibilities outside of work, making them more committed.
  2. Prioritize communication and feedback: Model timely, transparent communication in all things. Give employees two weeks notice of scheduling whenever possible. Openly discuss employee concerns and act swiftly to remedy them. Respectful communication makes work more efficient. 
  3. Foster inclusivity and teamwork: Give employees a seat at the table to discuss concerns, training needs, what they enjoy, and who they appreciate. Take the time to hear everyone’s opinions. Utilize exit surveys to learn what exiting employees dislike (or like) so that you can always keep growing.
  4. Support career growth: Emphasize skill growth. Frontline workers of today could be the managers of tomorrow, and promoting from within creates your own tailored talent pipeline. Fostering mentorship between old and new employees passes down and retains knowledge. What professional development you provide determines whether employees sustain a positive workplace culture and trajectory.  
  5. Give recognition and rewards: Reward employees with bonuses, gifts, and employee of the month rewards to show formal appreciation. Consistently give them thank you’s and praise from managers and coworkers to informally show appreciation for daily tasks. Make recognition a consistent, multi-faceted act to instill a deeper culture of appreciation and retainment.

Managers Sustain Quality

Managers are QSR cultural capital. The workplace culture a manager establishes directly influences employee retention and overall satisfaction. In fact, 70% of employee engagement is derived from management2 and up to 82% of employees would leave a job solely because of poor management.3

What makes a manager a leader who can sustain quality through positive workplace culture? Two keys: empathy and constructive feedback over pure efficiency and profit.

Coach: They give clear, constructive feedback and don’t micromanage but do instill a strong work ethic in employees by how they behave, teach, and lead.

Advise: They listen, learn, and take action when employees come to them with frustrations or concerns, showing empathy that cultivates employee loyalty.

Empower: They display respect, trust, fairness, and teamwork, encouraging employees to grow and feel capable. 

If QSR managers don’t take the time to invest in employee growth, they will never develop valuable, committed employees.

Hiring for Your Culture

Once you have established a positive workplace culture, your hiring managers can focus on strengthening it with every new hire. The simplest way to keep this momentum is to include pre-employment assessments in your hiring process.

Tools like personality and skill assessments help you to net best-fit talent by collecting insights on a candidate’s potential to fit your team and culture. Having data on a candidate’s hard and soft skills, personality, problem-solving approach, and team attitude better ensure that you only onboard talent who will keep your positive workplace growing.

Assessments aren’t just for frontline talent: they also help you acquire managers who are already proficient in coaching, advising, and empowering those they lead. Positive culture is only as effective as its leadership–so make sure you get the best leaders for the best ROI.

Conclusion

A positive workplace guided by talented leadership greatly reduces QSR turnover. Engaged, happy employees increase your profitability by 21%,4 and are up to 20%5 more productive. Leveraging pre-employment assessments in your hiring process helps you identify the right candidates for your roles, ensuring your positive workplace culture is maintained and strengthened.

HighMatch makes this process simple and effective with data-driven assessments that provide thorough insights into a candidate’s personality, skills, and leadership qualities. Our assessments are developed by collaboration between your team and unique priorities and our certified Industrial-Organizational psychologists. 

With HighMatch, you can onboard a suite of tools that gives your hiring managers the power to perpetuate positive workplace culture despite the challenges QSRs face. We give you the confidence and modernized practices to build and maintain a capable team who will boost your workplace culture, and your productivity, for years to come.

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