A Chick-fil-A franchise owner thinks he may have found a better way to recruit and retain fast-food workers by offering a three-day workweek.
Faced with an overworked team, Chick-fil-A franchisee Justin Lindsey wanted to come up with a better way to help his staff deal with long shifts that led some to routinely work 70-hour weeks at his Miami restaurant, according to an interview in QSR, an industry trade publication.
This Chick-fil-A is implementing a “3 Day Work Week” where employees work three, 12 hour shifts.
— 𝓔𝓵 𝓟𝓪𝓽𝓻ó𝓷 (@ZBankEnt) October 29, 2021
They make $17/hr, while remaining full time and rotate weekends. pic.twitter.com/BAx4Tx10Ke
Rather than increase the amount of paid time off, Lindsey adopted a plan that allows workers to work a three-day workweek, involving three-day blocks of 13- to 14-hour shifts, QSR reported, an arrangement simplified by Chick-fil-A’s insistence on being closed Sundays. Further, once a month, there’s a seven-day stretch in which one employee is off.
Since the store began experimenting with a shortened workweek in February, Lindsey has reported 100% retention at the management level with 18 store leaders and 20 front-line employees split into two groups, or pods. And it's not the only way the program has resonated.
Lindsey recently posted a job opening with the three-day structure mentioned in the headline and received a whopping 420 applicants. With the experiment a seeming success, we will be interested to see if other Chick-fil-A stores draw inspiration to implement their own shortened workweeks.
