More Power to the Manager ✊
At Trail, we know how hard it is to strike a balance between guiding and empowering teams.
Operational hierarchies exist for a reason: they entrust the right people with authority and accountability.
The Trail hierarchy looks like this:
- Champion
Our main contact. The one person responsible for running Trail day to day — managing tasks, setting up sites and inviting managers. - Admin
Has the same permissions as Champion. Often assigned to head office staff who want reports on all sites. - Manager
Assigned to & permissions for one or more sites. This can be a General Manager (single site) or Area/Operations Manager (several sites) - Team
A shared or personal account with access to a single site & limited permissions. Often assigned to a chef, front of house team or site.
Not all sites are the same
Trail helps maintain consistency and standards by distributing tasks from head office to sites.
Sure, specific tasks can be also assigned to specific sites. But what about…
Opening Checks that are identical for everyone except Baker St which also has umbrellas to put out
or
Liverpool St whose bins are kicked over every Saturday night
or
Old signage that needs replacing at Oxford St tomorrow
Are these the kinds of things head office or operations managers will know about? Not according to our customers.
It’s the Managers. Which is why we’ve built powerful new features to help them run better sites 💪
Why empower Managers?
Fundamentally, Managers know the details of what makes their sites tick better than anyone.
- More relevant tasks means better engagement, meaning critical tasks are completed and sites are legally and operationally compliant
- Reduce the dependency on Admins to manage small changes, freeing them up to analyse results and help low performing sites achieve more
- Increase ownership and autonomy within a strict operational framework, leading to a more efficient use of resource
What can Managers do?
Be assigned to one Site or an Area
Managers could previously only be assigned to several sites using Areas. Now, they can be assigned to manage just one — with the same permissions as a multi-site Manager
Add items to checklists on existing tasks
If a check is missing it can be added to a site’s checklist just this time or every time the task occurs, such as handover notes. Managers can’t access the Task Planner to create or change organisation tasks.
Flag a checklist item as Not Applicable
If a check doesn’t apply to that site — like cleaning equipment they don’t have — it can be marked Not Applicable just this once or every time the task occurs.
View & complete Manager tasks
Sensitive tasks can be now assigned to Managers only, like accidents, finance, or HR. They’ll appear like a normal task in the site list for them, but won’t be visible to Teams.
Re-open tasks
Mistakes happen, and waiting for an Admin just holds everyone up. Managers can now re-open tasks that were marked as done Today (not previous days).
Manage lists in widgets & forms
Many widgets remember equipment or food lists from previous days to make it quicker to complete. Managers can now update those lists.
Manage users
With such high staff turnover, keeping user accounts up to date can be a big job. Managers can now add and remove users from their site(s).
View reports
Managers now have better visibility over their sites’ performance through the daily emails, activity feed and Insights section.
The future 🚀
This is one of the most important features we’ve released and paves the way for a host of features to improve the experience for sites and teams. We strongly recommend that every site is assigned a Manager.
Your Customer Success manager can answer any questions and help get your Managers set up.
