How Goodwill Omaha keeps retail employees engaged in a new generation

“REAL WORK FOR REAL PEOPLE” is how Goodwill Omaha defines itself. It’s more than a motto, it’s a mission to fulfill employment dreams for anyone that willingly seeks it.
This core value has led to an amazing employee culture that saw the tactics evolve with its workforce.
Janelle Ellis, The Director of Retail Sales at Goodwill Omaha, directs their strong employee culture. Her 10 years of experience as a District and Store Manager instilled an insight for success in this role. Most recently, she lead an initiative to help her teams connect more efficiently with a new generation that, in her words, “clearly works in a different way”.
“It’s a new generation and those employees are not on email. They would prefer to use an app on their phone.”
Carrying out this initiative seemed challenging since change involved 300+ employees in 17 stores. Janelle researched her options and reached out to us, Shift Messenger, for guidance on the right solution for her team. Right away she found the simplicity and accessibility of our employee app made it the right tool to bring her existing staff and many new store employees closer together.
In just a few days, Janelle’s entire team was engaged on our Enterprise Version. Soon after she observed that accessing managers, reminders, schedules, shifts, and surveys had never been easier.
Before Shift Messenger, Goodwill Omaha stores posted basic paper and pencil notes in the break room to keep track of all store news and updates but it was really hard to get them around to the team.

Shift Messenger immediately changed that:
“All the employees love having the schedule on their phone…Getting a notification right on their phone when it’s posted is great!”
Since it is so easy to get in touch with the entire team, managers use the app to remind employees about store meetings and employees use it to announce events. Janelle says this provides a big boost in employee satisfaction:
“They are a tight-knit group. The team has been using messaging for personal announcements like ‘I am having a baby girl’ as well as productivity reminders.”
Beyond employee satisfaction, Janelle sees the biggest return on investment is the considerable time Shift Messenger gives back to managers every week. Ultimately, this allows managers to spend their time where they are really needed: in-store with customers.


“[Managers were] constantly calling. They have to leave a message and then they have to call back. With Shift [Messenger], they can leave a message and know it is seen.”
Shift Messenger even handles their biggest manager phone time offender: finding an employee for a shift when the store is shorthanded. Managers spend hours calling each nearby store to check in with other managers to get last minute assistance. With Shift Messenger’s shift broadcast feature, it now takes a manager two taps and just a few seconds to open up a shift’s availability to other stores:

Shift Messenger provides the cultural and productivity benefits to keep a new generation of Goodwill Omaha employees engaged right now. How will that change for their employees in the future? With Shift Messenger, Janelle found it easy to just ask them. Janelle receives consistently high response rates when she distributes employee ‘pulse surveys’ through the app:
“[Pulse surveys] are short surveys… they take a few minutes to complete and are done in a week… We just had a survey for an Employee Picnic. We used Shift Messenger to get a response on what to do and where to go. We even did a survey on how employees preferred to receive messages… And we are already seeing employees request to receive all their messages on Shift Messenger.”
All of this together gives Janelle the necessary information to continue evolving on Goodwill Omaha’s long-standing mission for their customers and their employees — and we could not be more happy to help.
To learn more about what we can do for you, contact us at support@shiftmessenger.com or visit us at http://shiftmessenger.com
