Why switching to Axonify was a critical ingredient that drove success and meaningful human connection.
Supporting how the busy, untethered staff at Taziki’s Mediterranean Cafe actually work required a solution that matched their day-to-day realities.
While their traditional LMS had helped establish some basics, like organizing training content and imagining learning paths, it delivered a one-and-done experience that left the People Operations team hungry for a solution that would get (and keep) people’s attention for the long term.
“Previously, our employees would do their training, but there was nothing about the experience that set the expectation or desire to come back again,” says Amy Parman, Senior Director of People Operations at Taziki’s. “There was no incentive for ongoing engagement with the platform.”
Lack of incentives aside, what really prompted Parman to seek out a new solution was that the corporate LMS-based approach wasn’t changing employee behaviors. The legacy system could only show whether someone completed the content and to what standard. Parman was craving more context around what each employee understood about their role and where they needed support so her team could better design training to achieve Taziki’s desired business outcomes.
“If we’re teaching an employee how to make sanitation buckets correctly, I want to know which behaviors they understand well and which they don’t,” says Parman. “And then I want to see if their knowledge is improving over time. So I’m looking at what they know and what they’re doing with that knowledge. Our previous corporate LMS had zero tools to even attempt building that picture.”
Taziki’s CEO Dan Simpson wanted a solution capable of making short- and long-term impacts, like immediately relieving overwhelmed managers so they could focus on their jobs, and sustainably improving frontline performance.
“As the restaurant business became more omnichannel, the complexity of being a manager left them with less time to train and develop their teams,” he says. “We were looking for creative ways to better communicate directly with the frontline, improve turnover and retention by ensuring our staff is confident in their work and [leverage] reports to measure participation, frequency and knowledge.”
Like Simpson, Parman was looking for a multi-purpose tool that could also create excitement, improve engagement and foster a sense of team inclusion. She needed the LMS to solve the problem of communicating with staff and ensure they had direct access to the critical information they deserved in the moments that mattered.
– Amy Parman, Senior Director of People Operations at Taziki’s Mediterranean Cafe
The learning and development team at Taziki’s chose Axonify to replace their corporate LMS because the platform delivers adaptive learning and personalization to frontline staff with the right information at the right time. It includes performance support, like job aids, that allow workers to self-serve resources. And it’s all wrapped in a gamified experience and communication tools that provide operational value and keep pulling people back into the platform.
Since Taziki’s is a franchise model, Parman started by rolling out Axonify to the corporate side of the business. (Internally, the platform was rebranded “Quest” to reinforce the company’s belief that learning and development are ongoing journeys and connected to Taziki’s values, which are expressed via its Culture Compass.) It was easy to get buy-in for this new solution as leadership across all levels of the business realized frontline employees needed unique training support.
“Our CEO, Dan Simpson, has always been ahead of the curve when it comes to building a people-first organization,” says Parman. “But I think everybody along the way has realized that our people also need to be connected to the bigger picture, our culture and key resources.”
For example, Taziki’s holds a monthly internal webinar and sends out weekly emails to staff. Before Axonify, distribution was restricted to groups with company-provided email addresses, which excluded frontline employees. With Axonify in place, they’ve opened up the webinar as an event that anyone in the company can sign up to attend.
The weekly newsletter is also now sent to all employees as a broadcast message in Axonify and stored in the central, searchable Discover repository in the platform, making it easier to communicate with all staff from the corporate level.
“Just the experience of being exposed to the bigger context of what’s happening in the business can help employees, even if they’re not going to do something active with the information,” says Parman. “It helps them feel included and realize how much more there is going on at the company.”
Rolling Axonify out to the franchises required communicating the “why” behind the new frontline-focused platform. Parman says there were empowering managers and staff who quickly saw the value of the Axonify training approach. Her team encouraged those people to advocate Axonify’s many benefits to their peers.
“There were people who immediately understood the importance of reinforcing learning and knowledge,” says Parman. “It’s been a good experience for them to realize that they didn’t necessarily remember everything they thought they did. And maybe they weren’t aware that their eight-year veteran grill employee didn’t know everything they thought they did, either. I think everyone’s had that ‘aha moment’ in waves over time.”
Although the corporate launch of Axonify went faster than the franchise rollout, in the first 90 days the majority of top-performing Axonify locations ended up being franchises. These results made it clear to Parman how hungry the franchise side was for targeted insight, guidance and leadership.
“Seeing how quickly some franchises took to Axonify and got their whole team on board with a strong performance from the beginning was proof that a portion of our company is under-served and under-resourced,” says Parman. “A few franchisees even reached out after the switch to Axonify and said, ‘This is awesome! This experience is so much better.’ So, they’re definitely excited about it.”
Parman reports that participation and training frequency in Axonify has been steadily growing, with many peaks along the way. She takes that as a positive sign that the employees logging in to train are happy with the experience.
“Whether our staff come back to Axonify for fun, resources or something else, they’re building their own relationship with the platform which is great,” says Parman. “I don’t feel like I need to push hard on continued engagement once people get into Axonify. And managers are realizing that Axonify is an everyday tool. It’s getting them out of the one-and-done training mindset.”
This engagement is having a noticeable impact on knowledge retention. One reinforcement topic for the kitchen team, for example, is time and temperature controls for food safety, which has resulted in a dramatic increase in the knowledge percentage for those topics.
Parman’s team is still working on growing participation in the platform, but there’s already positive momentum. With the old corporate LMS, a spike in training would occur when a new menu item was introduced, followed by a dip back down. With Axonify, participation is holding steady. In fact, over the last two fiscal periods, she hasn’t seen a backslide in participation for the first time ever.
Taziki’s managers also love the insights Axonify gives them into what their people know and don’t know so they can work on impactful behavior change.
“They’d have to catch someone doing something wrong in real-time so they could correct them,” says Parman. “Now, when they see someone is missing the same item on a behavior evaluation or a quiz in Axonify, they know what to do with that information and can coach one-on-one to fill in the knowledge gaps.”
Axonify’s Discover feature has also provided critical insights by revealing what topics employees are searching for and how integral it is to their daily experience when they need an answer. Parman’s team went to great lengths to make the searchable hub very robust and she believes it’s been a main driver of platform adoption.
“We’ve seen people ‘teaching themselves how to fish’ and that’s a nice change in behavior,” says Parman. “Before Axonify, at most maybe they asked a supervisor. But often employees just don’t ask. They just carry on because they don’t know the answer, don’t even know where to look and don’t want to tell their boss they don’t know. I think a lot of our people were suffering in silence and now they can find information themselves. So, that’s been a big behavior change. I’m excited to analyze year-over-year metrics to see just how much.”
And Taziki’s has recently added even more functionality to the Axonify platform, unlocking a renewed sense of workforce connection with Recognition Pins, which allows employees to send each other tokens and messages of appreciation.
“Our frontline teams have really taken it and run with it, and we love how much we’re seeing peers celebrating each other, not just their own direct reports,” gushes Parman. “I have to admit that I jump into AdminZone a few times a week just to read over the recent Pins and see what people are appreciating about each other! It really helps me have an even better read on where our emerging leaders and trainers are at every level, and what our team members look for in their collaborative relationships in the workplace.”
She believes that efforts like these help reinforce the larger company mission so everyone understands how they contribute to shared successes.
“Our mission statement is, ‘Creating an environment that combines modern Mediterranean fare with meaningful human connection.’ That second piece is what most often gets lost for frontline employees,” says Parman. “They’re in the thick of operations, there are 20 people in line and they’ve got a catering order to get out. Using the recognition feature to further tie employees into our values of connection and collaboration makes them feel that much more purposeful in their work and put the big picture together.”
See why Axonify’s Frontline LMS is the difference between “good enough” and “made for us.”