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&pizza: Employee engagement key to tripling off-premise 'overnight'

Should a pizza chain give its employees help with everything from down-time fun and fitness, to purpose in their work and mental health support? &pizza thinks so and has the bottom line results to prove the approach makes good business sense.

&pizza recently introduced a three-part package of employee benefits that leaders hope both engage store staff and support their efforts to stay flexible in a rapidly changing business environment. (Photo: &pizza)

May 6, 2020 by S.A. Whitehead — Food Editor, Net World Media Group

Should a pizza chain give its employees help with everything from down-time fun and fitness, to purpose in their work and mental health support? The leadership at the 40-unit Washington, D.C.-based brand, &pizza, thinks so, and the company is putting its money where its proverbial mouth in this case through recently launched employee wellness programs. 

Now, this is a brand that not only wears its community-mindedness on its sleeve (the name &pizza was created to connote the idea of unity), but has a history of launching programs that put — as its leaders sign their emails — "Tribe first." 

In this case, "tribe" means &pizza employees, and this story revolves around the three new programs created for them and first reported here last month, which put the basic human needs of those restaurant workers, front and center in three areas: 
•    &wellbeing: Provides free membership to the remote therapy program, Talkspace, to employees who want it to use as they wish. 
•    &fitness: Provides twice-weekly free fitness training for workers who want it from celebrity fitness trainer Devon Levesque.
•    &leisure: Provides $20 per month for each employee's online subscription selections, like Netflix or Spotify

"During COVID-19, we're asking them to show up to work, when just showing up can be a challenge now. With these new initiatives, we wanted to take that a step further because providing support doesn't start and stop with work."

-&pizza President and COO Andy Hooper

As you might have already guessed, these overall employee health initiatives, were first launched at the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic's restaurant business restrictions in mid-March. But now, says President and COO Andy Hooper, the company plans to adopt them as permanent employee well-being programs.

Before anyone reading brushes these programs off as mere "feel-good" stuff that's "nice to have if you can afford it," please be aware that Hooper was firm in his assertion that these programs — like any others at &pizza — is deeply rooted in the brand's overarching strategic efforts to make a profit. 

And guess what? Hooper said it's working. 

"The amazing thing about &pizza is that 82% of Tribe members say they are proud to work for &pizza," Hooper said in an interview with Pizza Marketplace. "This is compared to 63% of restaurant industry averages, based on third-party surveys.

"We've always been supportive of our workforce — celebrating the individual, employing a strict 'no ceiling' policy, paying a livable wage and providing above-the-mark benefits. That's a huge reason we've been able to triple our off-premise business overnight, because we have such an engaged team even during this crisis . . . We may be one of the few restaurants that comes out of this even healthier when we do go back to regular operations than when we were going in."

Are employees using the programs and are they enhancing the service &pizza's people provide, as a downwind benefit? Hooper promised he'd report back on the results after a few months time, good or bad. But for at least, Hooper himself, the fitness program was showing early payoffs.  

"I'm still sore," he bemoaned shortly after attending one of the first workouts. 

Build brand 'flexibility' for a new age

&pizza President and COO Andy Hooper hits the streets to hand out pizzas as part of the brand's Hero Pie Program. (Photo: &pizza)

The fitness routine is kind of a physical embodiment of the kind of flexibility the company's leaders themselves deem critical to survival in a pandemic-pressured restaurant business environment where only the adaptable survive. 

"&pizza really focuses on being flexible in format to target new, adjacent markets while fortressing existing ones, as well as a focus around younger culture-makers who are more likely to be ordering out right now while stuck inside," he said, by way of explanation concerning some of the general strategy behind the brand's employee programs and those focused more directly on customers. "This flexibility has been a strength for us, but it's really the dedication from the team that makes a difference, and that started before the pandemic did." 

But as Hooper put it, COVID-19 has seen restaurant brands asking employees to draw on resources that are being stretched thin by coexisting factors, like the need often to home-school children, forego or forestall scheduled health services, like any manner of therapies, and — at least during stay-at-home orders — an overall sense of boredom and feeling cooped up. 

"During COVID-19, we're asking them to show up to work, when just showing up can be a challenge now," Hooper relayed, adding that in early March as the pandemic restrictions were taking hold, the company also offered free pizza to employees and their families, raised hourly shop-level wages $1, offered Lyft for late-night employee transport, paid transit costs and expanded health and safety benefits, among other things.

"With these new initiatives, we wanted to take that a step further because providing support doesn't start and stop with work," he said.

The wider implications, ripple effects

But running a successful pizza chain is never all about employees, of course. And that's the case with this brand's latest initiatives too that include a menu revamp and frontline-worker food program. But then, even there, Hooper said, those community support programs benefit employees because the vast majority say that such initiatives make them feel intensely proud of where they work, along with bringing them a sense of purpose behind their daily duties.

Employees are certainly getting that through &pizza's initiative to feed frontline pandemic workers, called the Hero Pie program, which has now been expanded with the help of Citi mobile kitchen funding to include not just D.C.-area's George Washington University Hospital, but also hospitals across the brand's entire East Coast footprint in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Boston, as well as the commonwealth of Virginia 

"It really provides our employees with a sense of purpose, and gives a tangible reason to come to work — because something you're making or delivering today will directly and positively impact a hospital worker fighting on the frontlines to keep us safe," Hooper explained.

The company even instituted a massive menu revamp right smack at the start of pandemic's restaurant related closures on March 17, with new items like cookies, garlic knots, private-label teas and meal kits, as well as the fruits of a partnership with Dirty Lemon to feature their detox drinks.

"We try to make each decision purpose-driven, so we constantly resonate and engage with customers."

And like we said before, all this purpose-driven effort is paying off for &pizza in dollars and cents, too. 

"I can't help but be drinking the Kool-Aid," Hooper said of his buy-in to the compnay's methods. "As an anecdote, I should add that before the pandemic our business was 70% in-restaurant, 30% off-premise. … We flipped that to triple off-premise overnight. That doesn't happen without an engaged team."

About S.A. Whitehead

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Pizza Marketplace and QSRweb editor Shelly Whitehead is a former newspaper and TV reporter with an affinity for telling stories about the people and innovative thinking behind great brands.