Louis CarterFounder and Chief Executive Officer, Best Practice Institute · Founder and CEO, Best Practice Institute - Most Loved Workplace® | Organizational Psychologist | Creator of AI Workplace Intelligence and Employer Branding Platform

Transforming Hourly Jobs into Careers: A Manager's Role #shorts

3 Apr 2026 · 2 min

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1:55

In this short address, a company representative outlines the scale of their hourly frontline workforce—approximately 18,000 employees across more than 600 restaurants—and emphasizes the pivotal role managers play in turning entry‑level, hourly positions into long‑term careers. Recognizing that many hourly workers may be facing personal and economic challenges, the speaker highlights intentional manager training, development, and cultural stewardship as key levers for employee growth and company expansion. The talk also mentions a recent annual conference that gathered all general managers nationwide to reinforce culture, business objectives, and the manager‑as‑ambassador mindset.

Chapters

First of all, when I think about some people maybe, you know, having bad days or off days or, you know, tough things they're dealing with, we're primarily working with an hourly frontline workforce. That's who makes up the majority of our employees. We have about 18,000 employees across the country, over 600 restaurants, as you know. And so again, the majority of those employees are in the restaurants. We have a small home office to support those employees. And our whole job is really making sure that we can help them do their job, uh, to the best of their abilities. But with that hourly workforce, I've got to assume that many of them are coming from hard days and hard situations. They may have had other jobs closed to them, other, other doors closed, and so they may be taking a job with us. And, and we do a lot of work with our managers to make sure that we're maximizing those opportunities. So even somebody who came in just thinking they're taking a job, we have the opportunity to turn that into a career, which is great for the employee. It's also great for us with our growth right now. But we realize in these situations so much comes down to the manager and that experience between the manager and the employee. So We're very intentional about the training and development that we offer our managers. We're very intentional about the culture that we strive to create, and our managers are the ambassadors for that. So we actually just had our annual conference just a couple weeks ago where we brought all of our general managers from across the country together to talk about really culture, the business, but, but the culture piece of it is evident in everything that we do at Conference.