Shake Shack founder Danny Meyer orders up 7shift to retain good workers

Future. Danny Meyer’s investment vehicle is leading a new funding round for the already-popular 7shifts — a platform that connects employees with managers and uses machine learning to monitor worker well-being. The goal is to help restaurants keep their employees in the midst of a dining ramp-up. The platform may put a premium on making sure that restaurant workers — who are largely overworked and underpaid — are looked at as more than cogs in the machine after a year of recognizing their status as “essential workers.”

Retention on the menu
While many restaurants are scrambling to hire employees in a vaccinated world, Shake Shack founder Danny Meyer is using tech to keep good people around.

• Meyer’s Enlightened Hospitality Investments, is leading a $21.5 million Series B funding round for 7shifts — a platform that allows workers to directly communicate with management and rate shifts on their mobile devices.
• 7shifts uses surveys and machine learning to make suggestions to management about things such as which employees work best together to drive sales or which employee should be called up first if another employee calls in sick.
• Restaurants that have used 7shift have seen turnover rates decrease by 13%.

Meyer is using this “holistic approach to worker engagement”  to keep track of the emotional well-being of employees at his Union Square Hospitality restaurant group, which includes eateries like Marta and Daily Provisions.

The employee is always right
7shifts is already taking off, adding more 900 restaurants a month to its platform since January, bringing its total to about 18,000. 60% of those are full-service restaurants, while the rest are deemed “quick service.”

In his book Setting the Table, Meyer outlines the mindset that drove him to invest in 7shifts: “Restaurants, at their core, are human organizations that rely upon the people who work there feeling good about coming to work so that they can then feel great about taking great care of their customers.”