For workforce leaders, it’s natural to match a solution to the size of a problem. When turnover rates rise within an organization, for example, employers launch retention programs. When labor shortages emerge, policymakers invest in workforce development. These macro solutions focus on patterns across the workforce, aiming to leverage new benefits, career pathways, and policy reforms to right the ship.
These investments matter, but there’s a disconnect between the scale of the problem and the scale of the support hourly workers actually need. When macro solutions focus solely on patterns across an entire workforce, they fail to reach the individual worker who is figuring out if they can make it to their shift.
In the quick service restaurant industry specifically, investments are organized around major milestones like hiring, onboarding, and exits. This framing is rightly designed to influence long-term outcomes like wage growth and retention rates. Hourly worker instability, however, occurs in much shorter windows of time. A worker’s car breaks down the night before a shift or an unexpected bill makes getting to work feel impossible. In these moments, abstract workforce systems and policies are of no use to an employee. They’re just scrambling to keep their paycheck, and our workforce systems simply aren’t built to respond to these moments at scale.
Hourly workers sit at the center of daily economic life—they prepare our food, care for our loved ones, and stock our grocery stores. When they experience instability, it affects customer experiences, local economies, and the services we all rely on, and that gets the attention of workforce leaders. According to recent data, every uncovered shift costs $200 to $350 in lost sales, and a quick service restaurant employee who leaves their job costs at least $5K to replace. With turnover in quick service restaurants exceeding 100% annually, this presents a major issue for workforce leaders to consider.
But here’s what makes retention particularly difficult to solve at scale: the barriers are predictable in aggregate but unpredictable in practice. Transportation, childcare, and financial instability are consistent factors across industries, but the worker who needs a last-minute ride to a night shift is in a fundamentally different situation than the single parent whose childcare falls through first thing in the morning. And neither of them can be planned for months in advance. The barriers themselves are rarely complex—most can be addressed with simple, low-cost interventions. But they have to reach the right person at the right moment in the right way, and nationwide programs and blanket benefits aren’t designed to do that.
A recent pilot at a seven-location McDonald’s franchise in Maryland tested what real-time, individualized employee support could look like at scale. Escalate’s always-on app was rolled out for six months, providing 24/7 on-demand support and spendable funds for immediate barriers that threatened to become call-outs, whether that was helping a worker pay for a backup babysitter, covering last minute transportation after a bus didn’t arrive on time, or connecting employees with resources to navigate short-term financial challenges. Adoption was strong, at five times the uptake of comparable pilots.
Over the course of the pilot, 784 missed shifts were prevented at an average cost of just $11.74 per employee per month. That’s a fraction of the $200 to $350 an uncovered shift can cost a quick service restaurant. As a result, the franchise avoided more than $35K in costs in only four weeks. The data also revealed that program costs weren’t evenly distributed across locations. Some hourly workers drew on support more than others, driven by local conditions or individual circumstances. That unevenness isn’t a design flaw, but shows that effective employee support is needs-based and individualized, not uniform.
The Lesson for Workforce Leaders
The conversation around workforce retention rightly focuses on large numbers like turnover rates, labor shortages, and replacement costs, and those challenges deserve large-scale attention. But the lesson from this pilot is surprisingly straightforward: macro workforce challenges hinge on micro moments.
Millions of workers share the same barriers to getting to work, but the experience of each barrier is individual, and the intervention that prevents a call-out—or a resignation—is almost always small, specific, and easily solvable. Large programs may address the patterns, but individualized support addresses the incredibly critical micro moments. The future of frontline retention doesn’t require choosing between them, but building systems where the macro investments and the micro solutions work together.
Sienna Daniel is co-founder and president of Escalate, which works for companies to provide wrap-around support for employees, and Sean Segal is co-founder and CEO of the company. Imani Ford is a McDonald’s franchisee in Maryland.