I. Preamble
A big part of my motivation for starting this blog is to give me a place to write drafts for a book I want to write. My thinking is if I can consistently write blogs that cover sections or chapters of my book outline, I can eventually take this body of work and edit it down into a book I can sell as a package, while leaving the notes here for anyone who wants to access what I learned for free (plus a few other posts I'll do, like the one I published a few days prior).
I figure releasing semi-polished drafts, section-by-section or chapter-by-chapter will motivate me to actually write the book, while also giving me some feedback. That's right, you're all beta testers here.
Selfishly, I like to write because it forces clarity of thought and presenting the ideas floating in my brain in a coherent way so others can understand them. Altruistically, I like to write because I want to help other people get better at work, whether that's by sharing what I learned so readers don't have to learn the same lessons the hard way, or to speak to a shared experience that resonates.
Most of my career is in spaces that influence recruiting, training, and performance management. I think the space could be a lot better, and companies that don't invest in doing them properly will struggle against companies that do. My goal is to improve quality here because I find it interesting and think it's an important problem to solve that will benefit all parties involved.
II. Enter Panera
I got my first job at sixteen working at a Panera Bread. This is a fast-casual dining chain that's grown in popularity over the years, serving salads, sandwiches, and baked goods. I remember needing my mom to drag me there, while I nervously inquired with the manager about a job. He asked me to come back again, which I did multiple times, until he gave me an interview and hired me as a cashier that summer.
The interview was informal. I think he was impressed that anyone would bother to come back so many times for a chance to earn $7.50 an hour. We talked about playing music and he gave me an overview of what to expect as a cashier. I'd be working part-time a few nights a week on the register. I'd need to pick up some non-slip shoes and a pair of khakis, while the company would provide an unflattering black polo with their logo on it and a beige cap. I'd first need to do some online training that corporate mandated, and then I'd get on the job training before being expected to handle customer orders myself.
The training involved me sitting in the manager's office, sitting on a milk crate staring at an old computer monitor, clicking at images of ingredients. There was a lot of compliance training on food safety and walkthroughs of specific food, all coupled with details about Panera's unique brand, mission statement, and other things about the environment. They used the language "everyday oasis" to describe the experience of sitting at Panera with a warm soup or coffee, and honestly, I was sold on the vision, an experience available to me for a reasonable price at a chain in a strip mall.
Regardless, I had to spend two shifts just getting through all of it and hadn't even talked to anyone yet.
Eventually I was put on the floor. I was paired with an Associate Trainer. The difference in uniform immediately communicated status. They got to wear a cool black hat and had a more formal looking silver nameplate that said as much. Her name was Caitlin and she was a year older than me. She went to a school in the adjacent town. She gave me a run through of the store and how things worked. She walked me through the register and the process for inputting orders and the roles and responsibilities of the cashier.
There were five roles in the restaurant.
Cashier: Takes orders, makes barista drinks, and deals with the bakery: packaging pastries, slicing bread, toasting bagels, etc.
Line: Receives orders and assembles salads and sandwiches. Pours soup and calls out names for people to receive their order. In slow periods, they also do prep work to ensure they are well-stocked for the lunch and dinner rushes.
Dining room: Busses tables and collects dishes. Ensures the soda machine on the floor works.
Dishwasher: Wash the dishes and stack them so the line could take them for ordering. They also were responsible for putting soup in the thermalizer (a large metal box of boiling water). The soup came in large, frozen rectangular bricks that needed to be boiled before they could be cut and put out on the line.
Manager or Shift Supervisor: Flex where needed based on flow of the store, be the point of escalation for angry customers. They also did hiring and scheduling. They were basically the adults in the room to make any major decisions that impacted everyone else.
Caitlin explained this system to me and how they were evaluated. Orders needed to be input correctly so the line would be able to make the order correctly. As a store, we were evaluated on how clean we were, the volume of orders we processed, and how fast we served customers. These goals created friction, since over indexing on speed meant operating like a tornado, with food and crumbs flinging everywhere. Busy periods that were great for revenue were bad for cleanliness, and if the regional lead came in to audit, they'd give us poor marks for not taking care of the appearance of the restaurant or for not changing our gloves frequently enough. It was this delicate balance and dance to ensure things ran at a fast enough speed that didn't lead to order inaccuracies or lead to a health code violation. Leadership referred to the health codes in hushed whispers, as though the Eye of Sauron would send agents to investigate our restaurant if we spoke about it too loudly. Needless to say, it was a valid fear and an important measure that informed much of how we operated.
My role in this system was as a cashier. I spent a shift shadowing Caitlin, seeing what I'd learned in the online training live. She explained to me where to find things and how to do them. The online training was generic and didn't account for some regional nuances of our store. Beyond the layout being different, we also served items that did not appear in the training. This was partially due to the training being out of date, as well as NY area Panera Bread stores serving the glorious poppy seed bagel. The next shift, she shadowed me as I took orders, offering me guidance and feedback as I built confidence and familiarity with their system.
I honestly loved the job. The GM who hired me was great, most of my colleagues were welcoming, and I felt my efforts during my shifts and willingness to pitch in was rewarded. I was able to take home free food and get discounted meals. My friends would offer to drive me home in exchange for whatever leftovers I could procure that evening. I was promoted to an Associate Trainer in four months and cross-trained in all other areas of the restaurant. I was making $8.25 an hour. My manager alluded to me having a future in the business if I stayed the path, but I knew I wanted to go away for university. Eventually, our GM was promoted and a new person took over.
III. The Cracks Start to Show
What I noticed though is that the system did not always work as well as Caitlin described on paper. As I started working more shifts and seeing different crews, I saw that there was a notable variance in how we performed depending on who we plugged into the system. Despite the system being seemingly well-oiled, there were still variables.
Humans, in fact, are not perfectly interchangeable.
I noticed this in the front of house where some people would mess up orders more regularly or make drinks slower. We had an older woman who would chat up regulars while a line formed out the door. Some managers were not as good at forecasting demand, leaving us without certain items during peak period, leading to upset customers and longer times to complete orders looking for an alternative.
This was nowhere more apparent than on the line. I convinced my boss to let me cross-train on the line because I was getting bored of working the bakery and thought the people on the line were having more fun. The line typically consisted of three people: salad, sandwich, and one of the coolest sounding titles I've ever encountered: the Consolidator.
The salad person made salads, and sandwich person made sandwiches. The Consolidator stood at the middle, assembling the final orders, pouring soup, and calling out names. The Consolidator was like a ship's captain, overseeing the process and ensuring everything was assembled correctly. They made the call if an order was ready or not, and thus were the de facto owner of the overall line's performance day-to-day.
As a neophyte on the line, I was often assigned sandwich, which was generally perceived as the easiest of the line roles. The Consolidator was usually granted to the most experienced person working that shift. It was the single biggest predictor of performance that day and the experience of those working the line.
The variance this led to was crazy. If the person in the role was weak, it meant more returned orders, slower fulfillment times, and more chaos. A weak consolidator meant the people working salad and sandwich were also likely even less experienced or capable, meaning that the overall function of the line was poor. They needed more time to check orders, required more confirmation from the sandwich and salad people, and were not as adept at pouring soup in a swift, elegant motion that minimized leakage. The smooth pour required a level of finesse I could hardly fathom. This required me to waste time wiping the sides of the bowl to make it look more presentable. A shame I still carry.
We had one person who worked the line who was seen as the ideal consolidator. His name was Rene. They would actually put him on a unique shift: while most people covered the morning and lunch rush, with a new crew coming on for dinner, Rene was scheduled typically from 12-8, covering most of lunch and most of dinner. He was an ace consolidator. The fast-casual dining equivalent of a top pilot in the air force. If anyone was responsible for making Panera Bread an everyday oasis, it was Rene.
Rumor was that he got paid more than everyone at the store, almost as much as the Shift Supervisor, the lowest ranking manager. While most of the Associates and Associate Trainers made $7.50-$9 an hour, Rene was pulling $12.50. The Shift Supervisors usually made $14 or $15. Other managers who covered shifts in our store would comment that Rene's arrangement was unusual, but they stopped commenting on it once they saw him in action.
When working with Rene, the line flowed smoothly. He not only was calm under the pressure of a packed restaurant and orders flying off the screen, he moved quickly and intentionally. He rarely made mistakes. If you made a mistake on salad or sandwich, he would quickly identify it and have you fix it before it got to a customer. He was a quiet, stoic man: he did not need to use many words to communicate with you, and he was able to voice his displeasure without exhibiting emotion. You knew you messed up, and would need to remedy it quickly before Rene went over and did it for you. No one wanted that.
Needless to say, it wasn't a surprise that we tended to get our most positive marks from regional leadership when Rene was running the show. He learned peoples' talents and put them where it made the most sense.
When Rene wasn't working? Things didn't go as well. This not only played out in the data (orders were slower, we processed more refunds), but also in my lived experience. I felt like we were doing a worse job and was more insecure about my work with someone else at the helm. Towards the end of my tenure, even when I was awarded the opportunity to be the consolidator, I never could replicate Rene's degree of speed and precision.
Even more stark than Rene's absence was when managers changed over. The person who hired me, Dave, was the GM. He was great. He knew how to do all of the jobs and had respect of the staff. Dave would be able to hop on the line and outperform most of the regulars. Dave could take orders and make customers laugh. He modeled how to work well in the environment and was respected for it.
Other managers who cycled in and out knew nothing about the work being done, but still had the gall to tell you to work harder. This was most notable on the line. If the manager couldn't jump in and help the line move faster, they had no respect from staff. The best leaders were able to jump in and make a difference when the system was getting bottlenecked. The worst managers asked why the order completion times were slow while we were in the middle of a lunch rush, but they couldn't be bothered to put on gloves and help me assemble salads.
This led me to my first insight about work that would shape my interests and career: you can have a great system, but you need good people for it to run well.
IV. From there, the question is, how do I get great people?
The best ideas are only as good as the people executing on them, but hiring, training, and performance management are often done haphazardly, leading to poorer outcomes overall. These processes are also disconnected and often managed separately, meaning there isn't a clear throughline between them.
I worked at the restaurant for over a year, and during my tenure, I noticed a few trends: Our interview process was not bringing in the best people. It was also inconsistent. Managers would tell some people to apply online, others would get in-person applications, others would sit down for an interview without ever applying. Once we got to an interview, it was inconsistent: there was no manager training on hiring. Associates were treated as replaceable and fungible. You basically needed to have a clean record and show up when asked to be eligible. We didn't have any clear attributes or predictors of success.
This led to us hiring quite a few duds. I was promoted to an Associate Trainer a few months into my tenure. I wasn't allowed to hire, but I did have to train quite a few people who I felt had no business working there. Sometimes it was motivational, other times it was personality and work ethic, and sometimes it was just skill and confidence. These people who were brought in and immediately recognized by everyone as dead weight were eventually put on the slowest, shortest, and fewest number of shifts because they were a net negative on the system, making it harder for people who were good at the work. They now carried the system's weight on their back to ensure the numbers looked good. The desperation to meet demand for people meant that we cut corners, leading to more defects downstream. While there was an immediate scheduling issue solved, it led to other issues that took up managerial time and hurt our store's performance.
Training, was also, inconsistent. I was fortunate to learn from Caitlin in the early days. Rene was initially skeptical of my interest in the line, likely having concerns that this teenager working register would actually be willing to hustle in this part of the restaurant. Even when someone called out, the idea of cross-training a cashier to the line was seen as a risk given that it was a more difficult job. It was almost better to be short a person on the line than have dead weight during a rush.
For context, everyone who worked the line was an adult from Latin America (many with families they supported), and almost everyone on the line was a local, native-born teenager who worked part-time. As you can imagine, the part-timers were not perceived to be the strongest workers. When I showed interest in the line, I had to really hustle to prove I wasn't going to be lazy and do it just to avoid dealing with customer complaints: I wanted to learn and do well. Rene took me under his wing and we built a good working relationship.
Similarly, performance management was also an issue: There was no schedule for discussing performance or raises. This led to a lot of speculation about hours, pay, and promotion. There was little transparency here, leading people to assume the worst of leadership.
Lack of clarity on when someone could get promoted to an Associate Trainer or Shift Supervisor, or what they needed to do to show they were worth it. Shift schedules were seemingly made based on favoritism and tenure, meaning certain employees reliably got more hours at times that worked for them, while others consistently needed to barter with others on the team to swap to accommodate their schedule, because leadership had not taken their availability adequately into consideration. Some people would be taken off the schedule and need to cover for others to get back on.
All of these issues exemplify challenges that many organizations have. We had a great system for delivering work and clear measures to articulate how good we were at it. The team had clear goals to work towards shift after shift, and there was very little variance in the quality of the food actually served. We had systems in place to get standard products from our suppliers, standard processes for preparation, and so forth. The end result for the customer was usually consistent, but the experience of getting to that result had a lot of variance.
Experience matters: if people had a poor experience talking to a cashier or didn't get their order quickly, it was less likely they'd show up again. The food was still the same, but the people executing the process were different. The immediate result of sandwich was achieved, but the experience of getting it was different. In some cases, it would be so delightful they'd order more food. Other times, they'd never come back again. People still needed to execute well-crafted plans to get the desired goals.
And despite Panera Bread's rigorous systems for preparing and delivering food, the process for getting people to do this was not nearly as thoughtful. At each stage: hiring, onboarding, and retention, there was little guidance or process on how to do this well. While the training ensured a bare minimum of compliance and understanding, there was little consideration for how you got the best people who were worth the investment in training in the first place.
In Panera Bread for near minimum wage salaries, this was fairly low risk. The company also dealt with a smaller pool, paying low wages and offering no benefits. There's a reason the vast majority of people working there were part-timers in school or immigrants from developing countries.
Bigger companies with broader impact also have these challenges. So much gets invested into the process of delivering for customers, but little in enabling the team to achieve this. The best work environments not only have great systems for getting things done, but also have great systems for hiring, training, and retaining the best employees to build and execute in those systems.
This is difficult and messy, as anything dealing with humans is. There is no one size fits all solution, either. However, that doesn't mean there isn't a way to find the way.
V. What's Next
Since my days as an Associate Trainer, I've graduated university and have worked in a number of startup and enterprise environments in various roles across what is often called "human resources", "people", or "talent". These departments often have hazy definition and scope themselves, and pending the nature of the business, will vary from being administrative operators focused on bare minimum compliance to strategic partners embedded into other business functions, greasing the wheels of their operations with the right hiring, training, and performance management to ensure the business effectively delivers on its goals.
I'll be spending time talking more about specifics in these three dimensions. Hiring, training, and performance management. While they are all unique processes, they are all part of the same system of managing talent in an organization. My goal with upcoming posts is to highlight this connectivity across these areas and share what I've learned that helps lead to higher performing organizations that create better work environments for employees. To me, this is one of the most important and underrated aspects of business management, and is one of the most rewarding to get right.
I recognize attributing the value of this work is difficult. Businesses may be seen by some as an asset that generates revenue for a portfolio, but to others, it is a team of people delivering value to customers. To do this well, you need to have a strong workforce that is well-trained with clear expectations of what's needed to do their jobs well. This will make things better for employees, business leaders and investors, and most importantly, customers.
This post offers little in the way of "solving" these problems, but I hope this anecdote resonates with you in your own work. I'll be expanding more on specific topics and providing more "how to" type of posts later on, but felt this was important for setting the stage and getting started.
Let me know what you think: coniferblog@proton.me