The El Caribeno Bakery & Deli Case Study

Key Takeaways:

About El Caribeno Bakery & Deli

El Caribeno is a Georgian (the state not the country) bakery and deli specializing in Caribbean cuisine. El Caribeno is based out of Lawrenceville employees about 10 employees. So, according to statistics, El Caribeno is your classic local restaurant.

El Caribeno is experiencing rapid growth, which means that they need to rapidly hire new employees is on the horizon and that things can get a bit chaotic at times.

At El Caribeno, in order to maintain their steady growth, they use Connecteam to provide training, develop professional skills, manage and share documents, communicate with their employees across all locations, and, most of all, manage procedures like opening and closing the restaurants. Let’s dig deeper:

How Connecteam helped

Using Connecteam, El Caribeno created a mobile hub of operations where they could improve compliance, develop professional skills, and streamline day-to-day operations.

Training, company policies, and quizzes

You know how halfway through your new employee’s first shift, you have to take them aside in the middle of the dinner rush and do some necessary on-the-job training? Well, there’s an app for that. El Caribeno used Connecteam to create their own fully branded company app chock full of employee on-boarding and training materials.

For new employees, they created a welcome packet in the employee training app with onboarding policies that included information like:

• A quiz on where El Caribeno food is from (for an ethnic food restaurant that can be important to know)
• An employee onboarding program – complete with an I-9 and W-4 form available through the mobile app
• An employee handbook with dress code, time & attendance procedures, cell phone policy, employee benefits, and more
• Welcome packet with company details and history.

For shift supervisors, there’s also a knowledge quiz they need to submit and pass.

For compliance, all employees must complete a sanitation and safety quiz.

This cut the learning curve dramatically and with less of a learning curve you won’t have to say stuff like:

Restaurant opening & closing

I’m not saying your employees are inherently unreliable or that they require constant supervision. However, a restaurant is a tough place to work. Working in a restaurant can be rigorous, monotonous, and thankless. This makes it very difficult to maintain a high level of customer service, safety, cleanliness, and attendance day-in-day-out.

If you’ve watched The Food Network’s show, Mystery Diners, you’re well aware just how bad it can get when the restaurant owner is out of office. As they say, when the cat’s away the mice will play.  No boss wants to feel like they need to constantly police their employees to make sure they do a good job.

Connecteam’s workflow asset is a great way for restaurants to assign, manage, and receive insights for repeatable tasks that need to get done. With GPS signals, signatures, and pictures you can make sure everyone is accountable for the tasks they are required to perform and you can free yourself from having to be teacher/cop.

Before, LJ Polanco, owner of El Caribeno, needed to write up, print out, distribute, collect, and file documents and checklists completed by the various departments; with Connecteam, everything can be done from the app. LJ simply creates the workflows once or uses one of the ready made templates, assigns them to his staff and then waits to receive email notifications to generate reports.

Goal: Improve employee performance 

El Caribeno used Connecteam to do the following:

1. Create and share company policies with every worker.
2. Provide on-the-job training modules complete with quizzes and assessments.
3. Created Workflow assets for opening and closing shop including:
   1. Checklists
   2. GPS location for accountability
   3. Digital signature
   4. Built-in work orders for common issues
   5. Picture uploads

What can we learn from it

For El Caribeno, running on Connecteam means that management can focus on growing their business by making HR and operations quick, easy, and affordable to run. In fact, El Caribeno is now in the midst of opening up the second location of their successful business, and Connecteam is happy and proud to take a small part.

Many studies have shown that engaged employees are more productive and efficient employees. They stay with the company longer and are happier but that’s not really necessary. Any manager or business owner can make that connection.

What is worth mentioning is that it’s becoming increasingly easy and cost-effective for small businesses to improve their employee productivity and retention in the same ways that larger businesses do and have been doing for some time now using affordable tools like Connecteam. When a large proportion of your workforce is dispersed, mobile, virtual, or deskless, an employee engagement app provides even greater value making engagement that much more challenging but also very rewarding.