The ‘Match.com’ for Hospitality Brands: Harri Transforms Hotel and Restaurant Frontline Employee Hiring and Engagement Experiences

Labor management is one of the paramount pain points for hospitality industry franchisees. Harri, the full-circle human capital management concept, is solving this challenge for tens of thousands of restaurant and hotel locations around the world with integrated, innovative tools and data. What started as “the Match.com for restaurants and talent” has evolved into a platform that supports business owners and managers in identifying, hiring, onboarding, scheduling and engaging employees, cultivating a better workplace, a better customer experience and better profitability. Luke Fryer, Harri’s founder, knew the challenges of hiring and retaining staff all too well after 20-plus years of firsthand quick-service restaurant experience, and he had seen that the existing solutions weren’t catered to the hospitality world — so he built something that was.

“An entire industry has been built on taking a hiring and retention model designed for a desk worker and trying to retrofit it to support the frontline workforce and say, ‘That works,’” said Jennifer Ravalli, chief marketing officer at Harri. “That’s the antithesis of what Harri is. Harri is a product built specifically for the needs of frontline hospitality and restaurant teams. The hiring process is streamlined, managers don’t have to worry about compliance or the prospect of making a mistake that could have deep impacts on the margin of the business, and business outcomes are improved.”

By staying laser-focused on a hospitality-specific solution, Harri has created an unmatched resource that helps some of the world’s biggest hospitality brands improve the employee experience for their frontline teams. Currently serving over 55,000 restaurant and hotel locations and four million hospitality employees around the world, Harri is changing how the industry approaches human capital management with an innovative, person-first approach.

Harri Goes Beyond Hiring To Create Long-Lasting Relationships With Team Members

Labor shortages are an ongoing challenge for restaurant operators, and the shifts in workplace expectations surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic only exacerbated the challenge. While many industry professionals are noting movement in the right direction, recruiting, retention and engagement still pose major hurdles for operators.

According to Toast, a restaurant-focused point-of-sale platform, the industry’s turnover rate is still over 70% — substantially higher than turnover rates in private sectors — and about one-third of existing team members are “at risk of leaving the industry in the next two years.” The top four complaints of team members are bad managers, low pay, lack of recognition and unfavorable schedules. 

As the industry continues to grow, adding hundreds of thousands of jobs in recent years, the need for qualified, loyal employees has never been higher, but restaurant operators will have to make meaningful changes to recruit and retain staff.

Offering the pay and benefits necessary to attract the right applicants is a relatively easy change, but it’s only the first step. Once they’re in the role, team members want to know that they are recognized, valued and heard. Tools that create space for professional development, training and advancement, feedback, and schedule management create more attractive workplaces that encourage team members to remain loyal and stay engaged at work.

“Harri is an employee-experience platform, and we help operators build their teams, manage their teams and, ultimately, engage and retain their employees,” said Keegan Conrey, senior vice president. “What does that all mean? A lot of times, people say “workforce management” and they mean “labor scheduling” instead of workforce management. This is everything from communicating with a team to providing a place for employees to review their schedules and communicate with managers. It includes time and attendance and automated check-ins that are done at the time clock in the flow of work for employees.”

By focusing on engagement specifically, the Harri platform empowers managers to make better hiring decisions, boost retention, create a better employee experience and drive both the guest experience and profitability.

“We continue to add capabilities within the time clock,” Ravalli said. “With normal engagement programs, about 40% of employees will participate — even if it’s mobile-enabled and conversational. But if you place it at the end of the last shift of an employee’s week, just before clocking out, you get 100% adoption and 100% information.”

Through conversational artificial intelligence, Harri gathers insights about an employee’s work week, including thoughts on how the week went, any specific challenges experienced and things that may have gone right. Gathering these insights allows unit-level leadership to identify easy fixes — updating processes or coaching managers to improve the employee experience — and to predict which employees might be at risk for turnover.

“Harri Engage is helping us spot opportunities to ensure new starters feel adequately trained in their first few weeks and months with us, giving managers the insight they need to know when to intervene and help drive employees towards success in those critical first 90 days,” Cafua Management Company, the largest Dunkin’ franchisee in the U.S., said.

By providing additional support to new employees, celebrating both professional and personal milestones in employees’ lives and sharing important updates, all through an automated system, Harri provides a more personal feeling to the workplace and proactively encourages connection at the unit level.

Legal Expertise, Customization, and Smart AI Usage Power a Stronger, More Efficient Business

Harri has leveraged ongoing technological development to efficiently address the needs of frontline teams and their managers, including support through hiring, compliance and scheduling.

“Particularly in restaurants, compliance is critical for restaurants and franchise businesses,” Ravalli explained. “For franchisors, Harri offers a way to support the franchisee in navigating that without being entirely responsible. From a compliance perspective, everything is pre-configured based on state and even municipality.”

“Why are all of the McDonald’s in California choosing Harri? It’s what we’re solving for with automated compliance to reduce the risk and make it as easy as possible to answer a PAGA [Private Attorneys General Act] claim,” Conrey said.

The Harri platform offers solutions from a new employee’s onboarding period and continues to support owners and managers in maintaining proper practices as time passes, creating reminders about documents that might expire after a set period of time or overseeing restaurant-specific scheduling regulations to ensure no regulations are overlooked. 

The regulatory strength of Harri allows it to stand out within the industry, and it is frequently one of the few third-party softwares restaurant operators feel comfortable using.

“With very few exceptions … do we use third-party software,” Jersey Mike’s Chief Information Officer Scott Scherer said in a case study. “We stay away from developing our own labor management tools just because of the legal ramifications and the complexity of each state’s regulations. We’re in 50 states now which means 50 different sets of labor laws to keep track of.”

Harri’s customizable nature and commitment to compliance made it one of the elite few to be embraced by Jersey Mike’s throughout the system, and franchisees noted a clear impact, too.

Another top priority for employees and managers is proper scheduling. 

“The centerpiece for hospitality teams is their schedule,” Ravalli said. “‘Am I making enough money? Am I able to have the hours I need? Is work interfering with my school or family?’ Creating a balance between all of those things is such a central part of anyone who works on a frontline team, and that’s where Harri’s robust workforce management system can help.”

GR Waldrop, a 19-unit franchisee with the brand, said that before Harri, “it was challenging for us as far as keeping track of scalable strategies on how we can watch our pennies in order to make the most out of our schedules. There are thousands of dollars that can be left on the table, just from the scheduling process.”

Harri’s scheduling capabilities allow managers to create schedules and define rules around employees clocking in and out beyond scheduled shifts, and it allows employees to take control of their own schedules with shift-swapping functionalities. 

This gives managers a clearer understanding of labor trends and costs, and they can use the platform to further streamline future scheduling efforts. It also increases employees’ satisfaction with the workflow surrounding their own schedule management.

“It’s estimated that it takes McDonald’s an average of four hours per store to create a schedule, and we’re estimating that this will decrease significantly with Harri’s scheduling capabilities,” Ravalli said. “Being able to bring in two years of history and make adjustments for things that leaders know might impact their sales — like McDonald’s locations in recent solar eclipse destinations that were expecting a 5,000% jump in service — allows leaders to feel confident that they will have the staff necessary at any given time to maintain smooth operations.”

Partnering With Some of the Biggest Names in Franchising, Harri Is Revolutionizing the Industry

Harri has already partnered with expert groups like Meta and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business to continue developing its platform and processes, specifically as it relates to the conscious use of artificial intelligence.

“We’re using data science methods to create optimal AI methods for scheduling, for example, so it’s been ingrained in us, but we’re also not trying to overuse it,” Ravalli said. “We’ve filled our roadmap with things of real value, and we’re very intentional about where we use AI to benefit the manager and operator and maximize their time and the things they’re trying to put in place with their teams.”

Other partnerships with groups like ADP, Indeed, Toast and Restaurant 365 have allowed Harri to branch out and become integrated with existing resources that prospective clients might use, streamlining processes even further. While it has built a powerful, impactful ecosystem to serve restaurant operators everywhere, Harri isn’t stopping here. 

Harri has successfully built a platform for restaurant workforce management and now supports major national and international names like McDonald’s, Jersey Mike’s, Subway and Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers. In 2023 alone, Harri doubled its active user base, created 237,000 job listings and facilitated 2.6 million messages and 7.2 million job applications while maintaining continuity in support and engagement beyond the hiring process. 

Now, as it grows, Ravalli said the team is looking to reach beyond its hospitality focus, carefully developing additional resources to create tools just as powerful for retail clients.

“Within the next few years, we aim to establish ourselves in markets beyond restaurants, but we want to do that just as well as we’ve done restaurants,” she said.

For more information on Harri, visit https://harri.com/.