Currently present in Rennes and Lorient, the Loco Loca concept will soon be deployed in several other French cities. To support this ambitious growth plan, Samuel Gueranger, Director of Restaurant Operations for the Kolibri group, Maud Le Guennec, Head of Customer and Employee Experience, and Ludivine Bouric have placed employee satisfaction at the heart of their management and development strategy.
To ensure the success of this business venture, they wanted to implement a simple and fun digital tool, accessible both online or by smartphone, by their growing number of employees.
Given their extensive experience in the hospitality industry, Samuel and Maud know that a successful customer experience depends on a successful employee experience. The chosen solution should therefore allow them to:
- Enrich employee experience: look after your employees and they’ll look after your customers.
- Be as accessible as possible to managers and employees in the field
- Accompany new teams during the opening of new establishments
In our industry, customer reviews and comments have a huge impact on the success of the establishment. So we know that by taking care of our employees, we take care of our customers. Communication, dialogue, collaborative work and employee well-being have always been embedded in the company’s values and practices.
Maud Le Guennec
Enrich employee experience: look after your employees and they’ll look after your customers
In the hospitality industry, customer relations and service are key to success. Maud Le Guennec and Samuel Guéranger are convinced that the well-being of their employees is the guarantee of good customer service.
When the Loco Loca concept was born, the Kolibri group focused on the experience it would offer its customers in this new living space. After researching the various ways to ensure the best customer experience, the link between customer and employee experience was clear.
We wrote Loco Loca’s management policy and called it the “Employee Universe”. We quickly realized that we needed a tool for listening to and measuring employee satisfaction within the company.
Samuel Guéranger
Loco Loca wanted to quickly provide their “mayors” and “menors” (site managers), their coaches (managers of the various kitchen, bar and restaurant teams) and team members (employees) with a tool to understand their state of mind, to ensure their well-being and to provide them with the best possible conditions to boost their motivation. These teams, made up of 20-30 employees per establishment, primarily floor staff and for the most part in direct contact with customers, are expected to develop professionally very quickly in order to support the strong growth ambitions of the Kolibri group.
They quickly chose Zest thanks to the French start-up’s fun, hyper-intuitive solution that can be easily accessed from a smartphone thanks to its mobile application.
It’s also scalable, allowing Loco Loca to start small, by first deploying the Mood module of the suite’s Listen pillar. In just a few seconds, employees can indicate their mood of the day by assigning a score from 1 to 5 on their mobile, tablet or computer. This can be done anonymously and can be accompanied by a comment if they wish.
For us, Zest is a tool that allows us to monitor our employees’ well-being and to better support them. We explained to the teams that a mood score below 3 (out of 5) sends alerts to managers, so they can react very quickly to help the employee.
Maud et Samuel
Be as accessible as possible to managers and employees in the field
Before Zest was implemented, Maud and Samuel had no way of knowing the level of employee satisfaction other than through local managers.
The mobile aspect of the application was essential for us, since our teams are mainly in the field. In addition, the new generations are, as we know, ultra connected. It was therefore essential that they could access the tool from their smartphones.
In this period of crisis and uncertainty, the hospitality industry has been one of the worst affected by lockdowns, closures lasting several months, curfews, the drop in tourism and the implementation of strict protocols to respect social distancing. Zest allowed Maud and Samuel to work closely with their managers to prepare their teams and support them during the reopening.
After the first lockdown in 2020, they launched a survey using the Survey module of the Zest digital solution to consult employees a week before the restaurants reopened, and then about ten days after the reopening. These surveys made it possible to find out how they were doing, to understand their state of mind before the reopening and to do a check-up a few days later to see if their feelings and motivation had changed. Another survey also allowed them to find out how the teams saw the future of the Loco Loca concept in the specific context of the opening of a new establishment.
The Survey module also allowed us to challenge ourselves. Indeed, just before the July 2020 reopening, we organised a seminar dedicated to the management team. We then launched a survey to find out if this seminar had met their expectations. This information is important because it allows us to improve as leaders by offering our teams time to exchange or to participate in useful activities.
Loco Loca also used the Engagement Meter module of Zest’s Listen pillar to measure its employees’ level of engagement and obtain its eNPS (employee Net Promoter Score). Employees rated and commented on the engagement drivers proposed by the tool (which are divided into six simple categories, each containing 18 “key drivers” defined by a Doctor in Psychometrics). Despite the health crisis, the results were very satisfactory and the eNPS score was very high.
Accompany new teams during the opening of new establishments
Zest’s solution also acts as a partner to the Loco Loca concept to support the company’s growth and spread its values, culture, and “raison d’être” to all employees in the field.
As the establishments are all based on the same concept, the digital tool will enable the mayors, menors, Maud and Samuel to set objectives and identify what works and what doesn’t from one team to another. It will allow teams to share best practices and also allow the different establishments to challenge each other.
Zest’s Listen module does exactly what we need it to do. And we are proud to have implemented a tool that very few companies in the hospitality industry are equipped with. Our employees have welcomed it because they understand that it is an internal communication tool designed to improve their quality of working life.
Currently managed by Maud and Samuel on behalf of their “mayors” and “menors”, the Zest tool will soon be used by site managers. Maud Le Guennec and Samuel Guéranger first wanted to familiarize themselves with the solution and its possible uses before giving access to their local managers in order to support their adoption of the tool.
If the return to “business as usual” is confirmed, the “mayors” and “menors” of the various Loco Loca establishments will soon be able to use the Mood, Surveys and Engagement Meter modules of the Listen pillar of the Zest digital suite. They will thus be able to manage their own teams independently, to be even closer to the needs and expectations of their team members in the field.
