Krispy Kreme’s secret recipe for a world-class employee onboarding experience

We spoke to Sally Park, Head of HR at Krispy Kreme Australia & New Zealand, about how the company’s employee experience translates into amazing customer experiences.

Highly engaged teams, make for happy customers

There’s a lot of emphasis across the retail industry on creating engaging and memorable customer experiences. The key to Krispy Kreme’s customer satisfaction isn’t just delicious doughnuts, it’s deliberately creating an employee experience that is so overwhelmingly positive that it translates into their customer experiences as well.

Sally Park, the company’s Head of HR, says that “when businesses realise that their success is dependent on the quality and output of their people, it means that instead of focussing on the profit, you focus on people and when they do their jobs really well, the profit just follows.”

It’s a philosophy shared by the likes of Richard Branson who is famously quoted as saying that taking care of your employees means they’ll take care of your customers.

A dedicated onboarding & engagement experience  

One of the ways Krispy Kreme is innovating in the HR space is by using technology that helps automate previously paper-based processes to create a more dynamic, branded employee experience.

“We used to send out our welcome packs in the mail and I don’t know if there’s anything less inspiring that receiving a tax form you need to fill out with a pen. But now we’ve set up an onboarding portal for new starters using HROnboard, that gives people an exciting first impression of our brand,” says Park.

Sally goes on to say that the catalyst for the change in their operations was the opening of Krispy Kreme’s first store in Perth where they needed to hire 160 people. Trying to recruit that many new team members manually between Sydney and Perth was, in Sally’s words, ‘a nightmare’.

Since then, the new Krispy Kreme employees can’t speak highly enough about the new recruitment process, even saying that it’s way more fun than in should be. The great news for the company is that happy and highly engaged teams, make for happy customers.