CarMax’s Diane Cafritz on Empowering Hourly Workers

"Recognition is such a powerful way to make people feel valued."

Hourly workers often miss out on meaningful work, mental health support, and training opportunities compared to salaried employees at typical workplaces. At CarMax, where most employees are hourly, Diane Cafritz, EVP, chief innovation and people officer, explains how they bridge those gaps.

Listen to this episode of the Better podcast to learn how CarMax boosts engagement by supporting its frontline workers, and get practical tips for empowering hourly employees at your organization.

On creating a sense of meaning and purpose for hourly workers:

You might not intuitively think that working at a used car dealership will give you purpose and meaning, so we know that we have to be intentional about providing that for our associates.

Everything we do is based on our four values — do the right thing, put people first, win together and go for greatness. And we weave those values into every program and all our communication so our associates know that we walk our talk.

Our vision is to ensure an iconic experience for everyone everywhere. An iconic experience is going above and beyond, and the great thing about trying to achieve an iconic experience is everybody can contribute. So we link our associates’ work through their business objectives, through our recognition programs, and how they are contributing to an iconic experience for our customers. We celebrate when they go above and beyond for customers or associates.

We have quarterly communications meetings at all of our stores, and in those meetings, we recognize above and beyond iconic experiences. Recognition is such a powerful way to make people feel valued.

On the connection between customer service scores and employee engagement:

We ask our customers about their satisfaction with the associates they worked with. And whatever that score is so to speak, the NPS score for associate satisfaction, we bring that back to the associate and we celebrate their wins and help them improve when they are not meeting the expectations of our customers.

And it's just this lovely cycle. If we only worked on the things that were opportunities for them, meaning when they didn't meet the customer's needs, then it would be somewhat of a beat down, to be perfectly honest. So, we really focus on what you’re doing well and work on continuing those strengths.

When people are getting recognition and that one-on-one manager conversation about their performance, we think that they're more engaged because they feel more valued. And more engaged associates overall provide a much better experience for our customers.

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On well-being support for hourly workers:

We dedicate a whole month to mental health, and one of the things we do is we take leaders who have struggled with alcoholism or depression or anxiety, and we have them tell their stories, and we videotape them. These are leaders, these are vice presidents of the company, these are people who you wouldn't necessarily assume had mental health struggles.

We showcase them in ways that they’re comfortable telling their story. They talk about how they were supported by friends, family, the company, and their colleagues. That has been wildly successful and incredibly important.

We also provide access to Headspace for all our associates and their family. And we’re piloting a program called Empathy, which is a virtual-based app that helps you go through grief. What we wanted to do was say, what's the common incredibly stressful event in people's lives and what can we do? And we believe that’s if you have a loss in your life.

Financial well-being is very critical to health, and we have tried to make it more accessible and more affordable. Those are the two things, particularly that our hourly workers tell us when we survey them: affordability and accessibility. And so for both, for instance, we have done every sort of virtual service that you can provide. Physical therapy and primary care can be virtual. We are in small and large markets, and in some of the small markets, there is no access to even basic primary care.

On supporting hourly workers with training and development:

One thing that's core to our training and development is individual development plans (IDPs). Everybody at every level of the company has an individual development plan. It takes away the stigma of an individual development plan. I know other companies use that as, “This is how to get you back on track if you've sort of fallen off of your performance.” For us, it's for our most successful and our least successful.

We also offer 10 minutes or less of video, bite-sized learnings for anybody to take advantage of depending on what they want to work on. Our hourly workers are incredibly busy. For them to be able to find time for development, we have to make that time for them.

And if it were classrooms where we had to fly them, it's just not practical. To get them to watch something that's entertaining, educational, and easy to digest and then work with their managers on practicing, is the best way to train and develop our associates right now.

On providing flexibility for workers:

The top two things that are important to our hourly workers are pay and flexibility. Our frontline associates love engaging with people. They wouldn't be working for us if they didn't. So their ask isn't to work at home, or wherever they want. Their ask is, I want to get my child off the bus. Can my hours be adjusted so I can get my child off the bus every day? Hey, right now I need to go part-time. Can I go part-time? How many hours do I need to work in order to get my full benefits? Can I go to that level?

They need to be able to switch shifts with people on a dime if they can, based on what's going on in their lives. That's what they need. So as we think about flexibility, it’s not just salaried versus hourly, but what does each individual population need.