2y
Dear Current Employee,
Thank you so much for taking the time to write this detailed review. You bring up many really important points, and I appreciate receiving your feedback.
I agree with your assessment that having only financial motivation is not a great reason to take a job at Proof. We do face real limitations in our financial resources. Currently we have been spending just shy of 1/2 of our revenue on wages, which is higher than industry recommendations for balancing a food service business. Yet, the work that we do is pretty difficult when considering both the physical and mental skills required to be successful. With tip sharing, our entry level (no experience required) staff earn around $18/hour, and we have several open advancement routes possible for production staff members to obtain meaningful raises within months of employment, and attainment of $20/hour within their first year to 18 months. Our goal is to continue to push wages up over time, but this requires our company to reach new levels of success and cannot occur overnight. In the meantime we are working on getting more clear about advancement milestones and adding more structure to employee development.
You are right to call out communication concerns as well. Now more than ever we need to improve in this area to ensure our staff are in the know about the "why" behind company initiatives.
Recently we have acknowledged some critical mistakes that we have been making to contribute to less than ideal communication. Some are low hanging fruit such as a new initiative to meet with every new hire as owners (something we haven't been doing lately) and to have more structure and regularity around communications going out to the team from every level of management.
Your advice about having passion for craft and people is much appreciated, but I would like to challenge myself and our other leaders to do better in instilling these values to our diverse staff. I acknowledge that staff come to us from all walks of life, and that it is wishful thinking to assume that every individual will already have a passion for sourdough as well as the work that goes into making it. We need to do more to share our own journey in adopting these passions with our staff, rather than assuming that everyone will just naturally pick them up.
Regarding your advice to management: I want to acknowledge that as leaders we have in fact made many mistakes over the course of time, and that intentions and mutual trust are what actually matter in work relationships. We do not intend to be punitive regarding mistakes, because oftentimes mistakes are necessary to drive learning and improvement. Rather, we need to look closely at mistakes and seek common understanding from them so that learning can occur in both directions, on the part of the employee and on the part of leadership. In order to avoid making judgment errors in this space we need to improve communication and ensure that employees are heard when there are issues.
Thank you for working at Proof. I hope that we can foster an environment where you feel more comfortable pointing out your concerns going forward so that things get better for you and your coworkers. We will not always be able to avoid difficult moments, but I believe that transparency is a higher frequency that we can aim for. Once again, I sincerely appreciate the feedback.
-Jon Przybyl,
Co-Owner
