Marie Garrigue

▶0:00HostWelcome to the Built by People podcast, where we share the stories and insights of the world's top HR leaders. Join us as we dive deep into the minds of HR executives, uncovering their strategies, challenges, and triumphs in shaping today's workforce. I'm excited to, to welcome Marie to the Built by People podcast. Marie, thank you so much for joining us today. And as a starting question, I always love to ask if you could share a little bit more about your career journey.

▶0:48GuestSure. I'm a non-traditional HR person. I spent half my career in operations directly. Started out with 7-Eleven, spent about 14 years there, almost 14 years there. And again, half of that was in operations or in a support function to operations, even within that operation structure. And then the other half, of course, is within the HR space. I also had the really unique opportunity to go through my entire graduate education process. So I have an earned PhD in applied technology performance improvement out of University of North Texas., and I did all of that while at 7-Eleven. So I had a really cool experience to be able to learn in the classroom and directly apply in the workplace, and then also bring back to the classroom real-world experience that not every graduate student gets to see. So I had a great time there. I've opened a nonprofit to support primarily women escaping domestic abuse through coaching and helping them to rebuild their lives. I spent some good time at CKE Restaurants leading their field human resources department. And for the last 4 years, I've been the head of HR here at Fitness Connection, which is a gym platform, right? So we operate gyms primarily in Texas, but in a few other states across the country as well.

▶2:12HostMarie, during your time at CKE Restaurants, you developed a way to support franchises with HR guidance during COVID Without compromising their independent contractor status. Can you tell us the story behind that and how you balanced the urgency for help with the legal guardrails in place?

▶2:30GuestSure. One of the biggest challenges franchisees face is related to people, right? The hiring, attracting talent, keeping them on board, training, and then managing their performance. And unfortunately, because of independent contractor and the very important need to maintain that distance between the franchisee and the franchisor, Franchisors don't often provide human resource type support in any way to their franchisees. Of course, during COVID in the restaurant space, it was very busy, very difficult for operators to stay in business with their people. And our franchisees were really screaming for help related to how to stay afloat, how to keep people in their roles, how to keep them happy because they kept leaving, and how to stay in compliance with all of the various regulatory challenges or changes that were happening. And so what we were able to do was to put together a 3-part system that allowed us to provide support to our franchisees, like I said, in 3 ways. The first was really these large-scale platform opportunities. For example, applicant tracking system, being able to provide that to our franchisees as an opt-in, let them participate in what we were doing. For a reasonable cost. We also provided learning and development materials to them. I think a lot of franchisors do that. And then we provided individual— I won't say exactly consulting, but consulting conversations for the franchisees who opted in when they had more individual-type questions and concerns. Really, I think being able to quickly hear what our franchisees were saying, and then with my experience in the franchising space, I was able to identify ways with our legal counsel on how to get them that support without crossing any boundaries.

▶4:25HostMarie, when was a moment during that process where you hit a major roadblock or legal gray area? How did you work through it to maintain trust and compliance on both sides?

▶4:36GuestSure. One of the biggest requests that we had from the franchisees was related to the talent acquisition process and systems. We were decentralized in that way. Of course, many people are for obvious reasons. Our franchisees were really struggling because they were the biggest audience of restaurants. We had 200-ish corporately owned restaurants at the time, and anytime somebody searched to apply for, let's say, a Carl's Jr. restaurant or a Hardee's restaurant, they only were presented the opportunities at our corporate locations. And our franchisees were saying, hey, nobody's ever finding us because it's not coming up on your website. What we were able to do was, again, working with our legal counsel to make sure that there were the appropriate waivers in place and the appropriate language in place, we were able to negotiate with our applicant tracking system provider. Then we actually switched them to give more service to our franchisees to allow our franchisees to opt in and to buy in. To our provider, which gave franchisees the opportunity to have their restaurants seen on our platform. We made it very clear both in the platform itself and on the applications which location and which owner somebody was applying for so that we weren't violating anything. I mean, that there's very clear case law on that, and we made sure that we weren't violating any of those things, but still provided access to our franchisees to the large population of applicants that we're trying to get hired.

▶6:11HostMarie, franchise relationships are complex. How did you create an approach that scaled across multiple operators, yet felt personalized and accessible to each one?

▶6:22GuestAs with any operations relationship, it's very important for HR to be successful to build rapport. So we built rapport with our internal leadership on the operations side, so they knew that we were there to support them. And then we worked on building rapport with the franchisees themselves. In some cases, that was understanding who were the influential franchisees in the space and having individual conversations with them to let them know what we were doing. Another component of that was to work with the franchise owners associations or the franchise associations that were there on each side of the CKE brands so that they knew and could advocate for the service that we were providing if they felt that it was important. And then beyond that, being open to individual conversations, because even though those larger organizations are available to support franchisees, sometimes there's independent franchisees out there, right? Or maybe the single franchisees needed different services or had different questions, had different needs from us. And so being open to having those conversations as well helped to build that rapport and make this relationship successful.

▶7:35HostBri, what strategies did you use to educate and engage franchisees on employment issues, especially when the environment was changing so rapidly? And what stuck even after a crisis period ended?

▶7:50GuestYeah, staying close to the internal franchise operations group that supported our franchisees helped us to really understand what the broader needs were across the enterprise or what we were seeing with franchisees across the enterprise. Those franchise associations and being really open to presenting for them and directing them to resources that were out there. That's probably the most successful sticky thing that happened was being able to prepare the franchise leaders in their space with knowing where resources were, whether it's the Department of Labor or FLSA or various websites that were out there. We're talking COVID, all the COVID regulation websites and whatnot, and helping them to understand where either free or paid resources were available, even outside of what we did as the franchisor. And I think that's one of the things that maybe lasted even longer than my time there, that they knew where to find resources and kind of search for themselves.

▶8:52HostMarie, what parting advice would you like to share with our community?

▶8:55GuestLook, I think my two biggest pieces of advice are to be bold as a leader, be ready to step in and find places that you can provide value, whether that's purely in an HR space or even if it steps outside the boundaries of HR and understanding what your business needs. And I think that's the second piece of my advice is be very close to your business, understand what drives your business, understand the operating model, understand where the barriers are, whether again, they're HR or not, because being very familiar with what those needs are is what helps you to be able to find the solutions that are most relevant to your business and make the most impact.

▶9:38HostMarie, thanks so much for joining us today on the Built by People podcast.