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Country Fair cuts employee turnover by 22 percent with ZayZoon
Safe Response increases employee engagement by 15% with ZayZoon's Announcement & Polls
About Safe Response
- Locations: Indianapolis, IN
- Industry: In-home care
- Employees: 50
Employee engagement has a financial impact on businesses. If employees are checking out while on shift, or not showing up at all, that's lost money.
It’s not a unique issue: globally, a disengaged workforce costs nearly $9 trillion, according to Gallup. To manage this, employers have to think outside the box of their traditional offerings. Health benefits and increased salary or wage bands won’t always be the solution to close this gap for an evolving workforce.
Safe Response, a group home placement and treatment home for adolescent males, struggled with keeping employees engaged and reducing absenteeism.
Home care and assisted living workplaces have high turnover rates as is—adding disengaged employees to the mix makes it worse. To combat that, Safe Response once used an earned wage access provider that had some communication functionality but stopped using it because the cost was too much for how little engagement rose. It would be the business's HR partner, DecisionHR, that led them to a new cost-effective solution: ZayZoon.
After only six months of using ZayZoon, employee engagement has improved, with absenteeism decreasing, according to Ericka Blair, Safe Response’s human resources generalist.
Problem
Safe Response has a deskless workforce, with their employees working in homes and managing clients. Seeing other colleagues or managers for updates doesn't happen at Safe Response the same way as other companies, which meant more reliance on emails or notices that sometimes went unread.
When Blair began working at Safe Response, she wanted to improve this and offer more holistic employee benefit options. She wanted to find a solution with on-demand pay combined with the communication capabilities everyone wish they had again.
That’s when Blair found ZayZoon. “When we signed up for DecisionHR, we were told how awesome ZayZoon was, and I became really interested in what the company offered to employers.”
Solution
Login fatigue is real. One login for instant pay, recognition, and financial wellness tools can help boost employee engagement.
ZayZoon’s new communication tool, Announcement & Polls, has become an essential part of Blair’s HR toolbox at Safe Response. According to Jonathan Hernandez, a Regional Sales Manager at DecisionHR, ZayZoon was more than a benefit for the company—it needed to become a reliability tool.
"In a blue- and gray-collar environment where employees are on the move and rarely at a desk, giving people controlled, same-day access to the wages they already earned, plus a direct line for timely updates, made attendance steadier, shifts easier to fill, and communication actually land. It was better than the client imagined because it met workers where they are—on their phones, in the field—and it did so without creating back-office lift.”
Blair uses Announcements & Polls to keep employees up-to-date on general company news, team events and benefit enrollment dates. She also gathers data about what HR programs and resources employees like or dislike.
Blair says using this tool to notify employees about events has reduced her time spent “manually sending every single employee an invitation. It’s easier and faster for me to use ZayZoon.”
Sending a poll to employees is a new experience for Blair but something she and the employees are finding useful. For example, it’s a great way to collect data on employee benefit experiences. “When I look at my ZayZoon dashboard, I like how the interface has everything for me,” she says. “I don’t need to go anywhere else for this information.”
Results
73%
Employees use ZayZoon
15%
Increase in employee engagement in six months
30%
Active participation in Polls
Announcement & Polls made Blair’s workload easier while driving the behavior she desired: increased employee engagement and connection to the team. “A lot of employees are happy,” she says. “I've had a few reach out to me over the last couple months and just tell me, 'Thank you for everything that you've done.'"
Employees are able to stay on top of key dates for the business, events and ensure they have a say in their role and performance. Blair recently inquired about employee performance reviews with Announcements, which resulted in real, impactful career conversations.
“Instead of trying to check in manually, I sent out an announcement to say if you haven't had one, let me know. I did have a couple employees call me to say, ‘Hey, I saw the announcement. I haven't had my review.’ They didn’t tell anyone before.”
This functionality has also fostered a real, respectful link between Safe Response managers and HR and employees. “What I discovered is that I can use Announcements [to wish people a happy birthday], which allows the whole company to tell those people happy birthday, too.”
The majority of Safe Response employees use the totality of ZayZoon’s functionality: from on-demand pay to event notification to responding to polls, and everything else in-between. For Blair, the centralized nature of ZayZoon’s dashboard for employers has been key to piloting and executing on these new initiatives.
“I like everything centralized in one place. If I need to find something, I know it’s in one system.”
About Country Fair
Country Fair is a convenience store chain with over 70 locations in three U.S. states. Its mission is “Country Fair Cares—For its Employees, its Customers, and its Community.”
To meet and surpass their company mission every day, Country Fair partnered with ZayZoon to address high turnover rates and offer the best benefits to its employees.
- Industry: Convenience
- Headquarters: Text
- Payroll platform: Text
- Number of employees: Text
Challenges
High turnover and financially stressed employees
The convenience store industry has notoriously high turnover rates. The National Association of Convenience Stores reported turnover rates for full-time and part-time employees in the industry averaged 141 percent in 2022.
Driving employee retention was a priority for Country Fair, whose customer-oriented mission was negatively impacted by the operational burdens caused by high turnover.
While Country Fair’s turnover rate was much lower than the industry standard, at close to 60 percent, the high costs associated with hiring and training new employees still presented the company with a challenge.
“We're always looking for ways to improve that turnover rate. We do that by finding vendor partners and offering products and services to our employees. This was just a really good opportunity for us to add something to our arsenal that we thought would help us retain folks.”
–Steve Seymour, Director of Personnel Training & Development, Country Fair
Financial stress among employees was another significant challenge, contributing to absenteeism and productivity issues. This is common for most workplaces today, as ZayZoon’s State of Employee Financial Wellness Report found that:
- 35% of employees are stressed about their finances daily
- 63% of employers said that financial stress negatively impacts employees’ performance at work.
Employees who experience financial stress are likely to not show up for work or have productivity issues during their shift. This affects the consistent and high-quality customer experience Country Fair strives to provide.
Country Fair needed a cost-effective solution that drove retention and supported employees’ financial wellness.
Our solution
Earned wage access (EWA)
To help decrease employee turnover rates and manage hiring and training costs, Country Fair worked with ZayZoon to introduce earned wage access (EWA) to its employees.
When considering competitors, ZayZoon’s people-driven product, no-cost-to-employer model, and quick and easy onboarding process was the obvious choice.
ZayZoon’s emphasis on employee well-being, with features like fee-free early wage access through gift cards and bonuses, aligned with Country Fair’s commitment to supporting its team members. This was a key factor for Country Fair in choosing ZayZoon over other EWA providers.
ZayZoon offers fee-free gift cards that encourage employees to get early access to their wages via bonuses for gas or groceries that actually give them more money than their regular paycheck.
“When we vetted other companies, they wanted to charge for this, that, and the other thing. But our employees love the idea of the gift card purchases, especially with the add-ons on the gift cards. I mean if you think about this a minute, a $100 Walmart card, maybe 110 because of a 10 percent advantage on that card, that's ten dollars that might be a dinner at somebody's house one night.”
–Steve Seymour, Director of Personnel Training & Development, Country Fair
Results
22% reduction in turnover with ZayZoon
The impact of ZayZoon’s partnership with Country Fair was immediate. A year-long analysis comparing Country Fair employees enrolled in ZayZoon compared to those who weren’t found remarkable results: employee turnover was 22 percent lower among employees who used ZayZoon.
This is a significant reduction in turnover, which directly contributes to better customer service offered by Country Fair. Reducing turnover means that Country Fair customers aren’t impacted by the gaps in customer experience that can sometimes occur during periods of hiring and training new employees.
Reduced turnover also reduces hiring and training costs, positively impacting Country Fair’s bottom line.
ZayZoon helps Country Fair employees manage their financial wellness
Country Fair integrated ZayZoon into their employee orientation, ensuring new hires were introduced to EWA on their first day of work. This process boosted adoption rates to 37 percent, helping over a third of their workforce access immediate financial support.
Country Fair employees found that access to ZayZoon’s EWA helped them manage financial emergencies. One employee’s car battery stopped working on his way to work—a nightmare in the tough winters of Erie, PA. Because this employee had access to ZayZoon’s pay on-demand, he received an immediate pay advance that helped him fix the issue and get to work.
Other employees didn’t have gas money for the week, but by using ZayZoon’s gift cards, they could make it to their shifts.
ZayZoon’s earned wage access helps Country Fair employees manage instances of financial stress, enabling them to be more present at work.
“I think [ZayZoon] helps our company in that [it helps] people to come to work," says Steve Seymour, Country Fair's Director of Personnel Training & Development. "Call-offs hurt in a convenience store because customer service is lost when you’re short-staffed. So for people to be able to get access to their pay to get fuel, a new battery, that’s kind of a big deal.”
Empower your employees with earned wage access
ZayZoon’s earned wage access made a difference for Country Fair because it provided a meaningful benefit that helped employees close gaps between paydays. By doing so, ZayZoon directly improved employees’ financial wellness and job satisfaction while decreasing costly turnover and absenteeism rates. It's a win-win for employers and employees!
If your organization is dealing with financially stressed employees or turnover and engagement issues, give your team an impactful solution with ZayZoon.
Contact us for a free demo with a real live person who can walk you through our seamless, payroll-embedded EWA solution today.
“You try to bring programs in and see how they do for your company. Some programs go by the wayside. I have a feeling [ZayZoon] is gonna stay a good while.”
–Steve Seymour, Director of Personnel Training & Development, Country Fair
