Employees are the face of any business. How they perform their jobs affects the entire customer experience. As the saying goes, if you love what you do, you’ll never have to work a day in your life.
When Team Car Care, a Jiffy Lube franchise, came under new ownership in 2018 and assumed its current name, company leaders wanted to make sure they were making the right investments in their people.
“If your employees aren’t happy at work, they won’t passionately serve the customer as we should,” says Lyndsay Lord, Team Car Care’s chief human resources officer. “We had to start with our people first in order for that to transcend into the guest experience.”
The Challenge
With new ownership came a renewed focus on improving employee morale. Company leaders had an opportunity to reset their practices and create a stronger framework for team members. The challenge was in determining what that framework would be and how the company would implement it.
The Solutions
Setting Goals
The first step was for leaders to establish company values and set goals that align with them. Leadership defined their values with an acronym: RITTE. That stands for respect, integrity, trust, teamwork, and excellence.
“If you don't have the right people that are living by a standard set of values, all serving and motivating in the right way, you won’t be successful,” Lord says.
While it’s always a good idea to set goals for yourself, Team Car Care wanted to take it a step further. In 2018, the executive team started to develop an integrated operating system to track the progress of each store and officially rolled it out in 2019. Basically, Lord says it’s a scorecard that ranks each location’s general managers and how their stores are performing.
The scorecard is streamlined to measure every store and manager the exact same way, and looks over categories like traffic, ticket average, customer review scores, sales projections and actual sales compared to the year prior, email capture rates, and much more.
Implementing Training
To grow their team further, Team Car Care invested in training courses across topics such as leadership, sales, and overall processes of the shop. On top of this, Lord says they want the company’s environment to be as inclusive as possible, so they invested in training focused on how to be an inclusive leader in a modern era. This training is focused on providing an environment that is free of bias, racism, sexism, stereotyping, and other discriminatory actions.
“We needed to ensure that teammates understand what bias is and recognize it within ourselves to bring our very best selves to work,” Lord says.
Providing More Opportunities
Team Car Care wanted to invest back into its team. To start, they invested in their benefits, added a 401(K) match plan, rolled out a new store-level bonus plan, and reduced the cost of employees’ healthcare by up to 50 percent.
The company also wanted to restructure its field leadership team within the company. Through this, the company established two senior vice presidents, eight regional vice presidents, newly established vice president roles, several district managers, and even created a full training team with a vice president of training and national field trainers. The best part of all of this? All of these positions were internal promotions. And every quarter, the company holds an internal promotion rate of 25 percent to get employees from technicians to higher-up positions within the company.
Lord says it is truly possible to start as an auto technician and work your way up to a higher position like CEO. The company’s current CEO, Steve Werner, was a tech in Nebraska 30 years ago.
“Nearly all of our leaders can tell their experience of starting out in the store,” Lord says.
The Aftermath
Since implementing all of these changes at the beginning of 2019, Lord says the company has continued to get great feedback from employees and has seen immense growth in sales and a reduction in turnover by 20 percent from the year prior. The company’s comp sales have been positive every single quarter, excluding the onset of COVID-19, and have since rebounded.
The Takeaway
Overall, the company has increased employee morale. It means that employees understand what’s expected of them, they care about their role, feel they have a purpose within the company. All of that leads to dedicated, hardworking employees, which makes the Team Car Care experience what it is today.
Correction: The original version of this article misspelled Steve Werner's name.
