Many franchisees have accepted turnover as a cost of doing business in QSR. You recruit, you train, someone leaves, you recruit again. The cycle is so familiar that it rarely seems worth a thought.
But when we surveyed 1,000 Americans who had worked in quick-service restaurants, the results suggested that employee churn tends to correlate with preventable issues. Nearly 43% of respondents left the business that hired them before they ever worked independently. Among those who described their onboarding as inefficient, more than half were gone before training ended. That’s not a downside of the industry. That's a poorly designed process, and processes can be fixed.
Early exits lined up with specific friction points: paperwork that wasn't ready, pay that wasn't set up, schedules that changed without warning, managers too buried in administration to do much managing. None of those are catastrophic failures. They're the kind of small inconveniences and disappointments that add up to an employee deciding, somewhere around week two, that this place isn't worth it.
For a single-location operator, that costs you a hire. For a multi-unit franchise organization, the costs compound across every location while often pulling from the same limited labor pool. It’s not difficult to see just how quickly that stops being an HR issue and becomes a margin issue.
Here are the areas costing franchisees their hires, and how to fix them.
Paperwork
The most common onboarding complaint in the survey was hiring paperwork. Nearly one in five respondents said completing employment forms wasn't efficient. This shouldn’t be all that surprising. Just think about what the experience is like from the employee's perspective: they accept the job, show up, and the first thing they're asked to do is fill out a stack of forms while a manager stresses about getting everything in the right order. That's the first impression.
So what if you moved paperwork out of the first shift entirely? A fully digitized, mobile-friendly onboarding workflow can handle tax forms, direct-deposit setup, and required acknowledgments in advance. Electronic systems have the additional benefit of allowing data to flow directly into the employee record and flagging anything that’s missing or out of place.
By merely allowing your employees to handle paperwork in a convenient, stress-free environment, you’ve eliminated a significant share of day-one friction while removing the compliance burden from your managers. The employee arrives ready to learn the job. The manager is ready to teach it.
Payroll
Getting paid, correctly and on time, is ultimately what makes employees come back to work. Mess up the initial payroll entry, and you’ve signaled that the back office is disorganized and that they can’t count on you to deliver your end of the bargain. Frustrations with payroll, tax, and direct-deposit setup were the second biggest onboarding complaint surfaced by the survey.
Payroll readiness is a day-one requirement. Make sure new hires can easily set up direct deposit, including nontraditional accounts like Venmo or Cash App, in a tap or two. Never let someone start a shift unless payment elections, tax information, time-clock access, and the payroll record are already set up in a centralized system. An employee who has put in hours is one you’re responsible for paying. A complication you discover down the line won’t excuse you; it will just make them trust you less the next time around.
For multi-unit operators, this also means getting location-specific pay rules right across every store: differentials, overtime requirements, applicable state or local rules. A centralized system is useful only when the underlying data is accurate for each location. Different regions have different requirements for how employees must be paid, and inadvertently breaking those rules is as much a compliance risk as it is a relational one.
Scheduling and Communication
The survey found that schedule communication was the single most common source of dissatisfaction once employees were working independently. More than 19% said schedules, shift changes, and staffing updates weren't communicated in a timely, organized way. About 18% reported problems with how managers communicated operational updates and daily instructions.
For a franchise organization, part of this problem is just inconsistency. An employee might get their schedules through an app, receive text updates from one manager, and get emails from another. At the next location, all the employees are thrown into a group text and schedules are emailed in a spreadsheet. Confusion and miscommunication is inevitable.
The fix is standardization. One channel across the franchise for schedules, shift changes,
call-outs, and available shifts. Employees should be able to see their current schedule on their phone without calling anyone. Time-off requests and shift swaps should move through the same system, with manager approval built in, rather than through informal texts that may or may not get tracked.
Management
When it came to training, the most common complaint was inefficient coordination among managers, trainers, and coworkers. The training itself wasn’t the primary concern. The management was.
Franchise managers are already juggling food costs, customer service, staffing, and store performance. When you layer manual HR administration on top, something has to give. Usually it's the attention managers can give to the person they just hired.
But the critical rules-based work keeping managers occupied is also the work that’s most easily automated: form routing, incomplete-field reminders, scheduling conflict flags, routine employee requests, etc. All that time can instead be spent on training new hires, answering their questions, and making sure they’re equipped to do what’s expected of them.
Efficiency isn't about removing the human side of the job. It's about removing the administrative layer that prevents managers from doing the human side of the job.
The Cost of Friction
Efficiency and trust move hand in hand. Employees who indicated during the survey that workplace processes decreased their trust were far more likely to also describe those same processes as inefficient. A friction-filled experience doesn’t just annoy your employees; it undermines their confidence in your franchise as an employer.
The other side of that coin is that trust can be protected systemically. Turnover is one of the biggest controllable costs that franchisees have, and it’s one you can start addressing today—one process at a time. When you run a tight ship, you earn the loyalty of your crew.
Matt Umholtz is President and Chief Strategy Officer with AllianceHCM.
Bio
Matt Umholtz is President & Chief Strategy Officer of AllianceHCM, bringing over two decades of experience in payroll and human capital management. He leads go-to-market for one of the industry's most tenured, fastest-growing HCM providers. AllianceHCM is also an approved partner of Wendy's Quality Supply Chain Co-op, serving 6,000+ restaurants across the U.S. and Canada.
He joined Alliance through its 2020 merger with PaySphere, the payroll and HR tech firm he founded in 2012 and grew onto the Inc. 5000 list multiple times. Matt is one of the few in this industry to have bootstrapped, scaled, and exited a business, having started in payroll sales at a
large publicly traded provider. His mantra, "Never Just A Number," reflects his commitment to service, accountability, and lasting impact for clients and teams alike.
A Texas State University grad (BBA, Marketing, McCoy College of Business), Matt calls Houston, Texas home, just down the road from Alliance's own headquarters.