What top leaders are doing differently to build teams that stay, engage, and thrive.
Organizations everywhere are facing tighter labor pools, higher customer expectations, and constant operational pressure. And the numbers tell the story: 73% of frontline workers feel disconnected from their organization. When those team members leave, SHRM estimates it costs $4,700 per hire to replace each one. Multiply that by your turnover rate and the math gets ugly fast.
In a recent SG Voices webinar, “Engaging & Empowering Your C-store Team, Even Under Pressure,” goHappy’s Andy Morgan, Director of Frontline Engagement, sat down with two leaders who are tackling this head-on — Laura Varn, owner of Laura Varn & Associates and former VP at Parkland Fuel Corp., and Melanie Disney, Head of HR at Calloway Oil / EZ Stop Food Marts — to talk about what’s actually working to engage and retain frontline teams right now.
Here are the five strategies that came through loud and clear.
1. Communicate consistently — and in ways that really reach your team
Both Laura and Melanie came back to the same theme over and over: communication is everything. But not the kind that lives in an app nobody downloads or a poster gathering dust in the break room.
“You just cannot overcommunicate enough,” Laura said. “And you’ve got to keep in mind that people need to hear things seven or ten times before it really resonates.”
For Laura, that means town halls with real recognition and shout-outs and using goHappy to keep consistent touchpoints going with team members who don’t have company email. For Melanie, it means using text-based messaging to broadcast recognition stories tied to the company’s core values, making sure every team member sees what “great” looks like at EZ Stop.
The message from both: if your frontline team isn’t hearing from you regularly and in ways that really reach them, this is a great place to start.
2. Invest in your frontline supervisors
One of the strongest threads in the conversation was the critical role of frontline supervisors and how to set them up for success. These are often your newest leaders. Great cashiers or shift leads last month, now responsible for keeping an entire team engaged.
“We promote people because of their technical skills, but we don’t often think, do they have the right leadership skills?” Laura said. “And that’s okay — but it’s our job to equip them, train them, make sure they’re ready for that part.”
Laura, who’s currently building a culture from scratch with 600 new team members, has been laser-focused on making sure her supervisors have the right people leadership skills to match their technical abilities. Because when those frontline leaders feel supported, they pass that same energy down to their teams. When they feel ignored, so does everyone else.
Her advice for anyone feeling overwhelmed? Start simple. Schedule a 15-minute call with your supervisors. Ask three questions: What’s working for you? What do you need? What should I know right now? You don’t need a formal program or a new budget line. You need to dig in, lean in, and be a little more present.
3. Build real connections with your team members
Melanie saw a gap that a lot of operators might recognize: some of her highest-performing leaders couldn’t recall their own employees’ last names when calling HR. They weren’t bad leaders. They were busy ones — so task-focused that the human connection had slipped.
Her solution? A bingo card exercise at a managers’ meeting, filled with personal questions about their teams. Do they have kids? Pets? A favorite restaurant? The results were eye-opening.
“You take little nuggets away from things like this and try to make them work,” Melanie said. “But our managers are so busy they sometimes go back to the front lines, get back to their tasks, and forget. So we keep coming back to it.”
And that’s the key, she didn’t leave it as a one-time exercise. Melanie committed to monthly connection conversations by district, all year long, to make sure the focus on relationships doesn’t fade when the day-to-day takes over. The early results speak for themselves: turnover is already down roughly 20% since they started.
4. Define your culture, then live it every day
Melanie shared how Calloway Oil / EZ Stop Food Marts built their culture around a simple rallying cry: Nice People, Good Stuff. But the key wasn’t the slogan. It was defining exactly what “nice” means in practice and tying everything from onboarding to recognition to corrective actions back to those values.
“You can’t just throw culture out there,” Melanie said. “It becomes wallpaper if it’s just hanging on a poster in the back room and it’s in the handbook, but it’s not communicated and it’s not lived every single day.”
Their NICE program recognizes team members monthly for embodying those values, with real stories behind each nomination. A team member who carried firewood to a customer’s car during a snowstorm. Another who helped a widowed woman air up her tires. Those stories get broadcast to the whole team through goHappy, reinforcing what the culture looks like in action, not just in theory.
5. Listen to your employees and act on what they tell you
Laura emphasized the power of employee-shaped culture. Yes, culture flows from the top down. But the people closest to the work almost always know what needs to change.
She shared a simple but telling example: while doing a stay interview on the manufacturing floor, she learned that a team member didn’t even know the company had a referral program. She told him about it, and the next day he sent over five names. They hired four of them.
“It doesn’t need to be anything formal or really complex,” Laura said. “It honestly is just having those authentic, genuine communications. And I find that if you do that, you will get so much information out of the employees because they want to help make the company better.”
The thread that ties it all together
Melanie left us with one final reminder that every operator should take to heart: what works today won’t work forever.
“You always have to ebb and flow with your employees,” she said. “You can’t take your finger off the pulse. What works today is not going to work six months from now.”
Tools like goHappy keep the communication flowing and the recognition reaching every team member through a simple text — no app downloads, no logins, no friction. But the tool is only as good as the intent behind it. You still need to show up, walk the floor, and look your people in the eye.
Engagement isn’t a program, it’s a practice. And it starts with the small, intentional moments that make your team feel valued.
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